"Beyond Debt makes an innovative and compelling contribution to anthropologies of finance and studies in Islamic finance in particular. This book is recommended for specialists in these fields, along with graduate students and scholars interested in globalization, money, and the economy. Highly recommended."

CHOICE

"[Beyond Debt] is a detailed and sensitive study of experiments in finance and banking at a time when there is much to be enraged about the relentlessness of capitalism. It delves into the practicalities and intricacies of doing this experiment through the voices of numerous interlocutors. It is a rich ethnography of a financial experiment.”
 

SOJOURN

“This book sets a new standard for the ethnography of global finance with its detailed account of contemporary financial practices in a non-Western context. In addition, Rudnyckyj pays equal attention to infrastructure, cultural styles, and expert discourses. Beyond Debt is a major corrective to our dominant Euro-American understandings of debt, equity, risk, and profit, and thus offers new ideas for both theory and practice.”

Arjun Appadurai, New York University

“Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Malaysia, Rudnyckyj illuminates how Islamic finance experts design an alternate risk-sharing financial regime that challenges the debt-based norms of global finance. He provides a richly detailed portrait of the critical reasoning, institutions, and practices that mobilize Islam for a new system of wealth generation. This pioneering study should be read by everyone interested in the interlacing of religious piety and international entrepreneurialism, and the neglected role of Muslim societies in redesigning contemporary capitalism.”

Aihwa Ong, author of Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life

“Focusing on efforts—orchestrated from within the Malaysian central bank—to design a new global system of Islamic finance, Rudnyckyj reveals an interpretative realm where the logics of finance can be appraised theoretically and evaluated ethnographically. He demonstrates with skill and acuity how experiments in Islamic finance—which allow surplus capital to flow to businesses without incurring conventional debt obligations—can yield a compelling demonstration of the salience of finance in underwriting our lives together and shaping the contingencies of our futures. A tour de force account of a critical contemporary problem, this path-breaking book will be debated for many years to come. Beyond Debt is a unique and paradigm-shattering work that should be mandatory reading for everyone from financiers and central bankers to activists and reformers to anthropologists and scholars of religion.”

Douglas R. Holmes, Binghamton University

"Based on interviews with financial experts and observations from within government think tanks and regulatory bodies(intermittently from 2010–2015) in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj explores the impact of developing Kuala Lumpur as a hub for Islamic financial services. Focusing on “how new forms of subjectivity and connectivity are produced through economic action”, this work contributes to the ethnographic exploration of economies and cultures."

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania (BIJDR TAAL-LAND-V)

“In Beyond Debt, Daromir Rudnyckyj paints a compelling picture of Malaysia’s efforts to turn KL into the pre-eminent global city of Islamic finance, and by extension how it came to have a significant impact on the industry itself.”

Penang Monthly

"Daromir Rudnyckyi’s Beyond Debt is a meticulous discussion of challenges that Islamic finance faces. . . . Indeed, Rudnyckyi’s main objective is to provide an anthropology of Islamic finance to challenge the debt-based financial system in the secular world."

Journal of the American Academy of Religion