Front and Back Covers, Volume 32, Number 6. December 2016

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 6Front coverSLEIGHT OF HAND & ISLAMIC FINANCEFollowing recent crises few see any alternatives to prevailing financial practices and networks in which Wall Street and the City of London wield enormous influence. The Malaysian state has sought to devise an alternative financial system based on Islamic principles, foremost among them a prohibition on interest‐bearing loans. Simultaneously, the Malaysian Central Bank has sought to position Kuala Lumpur as a principal node in what planners envision as an alternative global financial network.Adverts for Islamic financial products offered by the dozens of Islamic financial firms operating in Malaysia, such as the one on the right, are ubiquitous and serve as graphic testament to the hope that Islamic finance offers both more stable global financial arrangements and a means of sustaining the country's record of economic growth.In this issue, Daromir Rudnyckyj examines contemporary debates over the authenticity of Islamic finance. Ethnographic attention to the convergence of religious practice and economic action has often been taken as evidence of the mystifying nature of capitalism. In contrast, Rudnyckyj approaches the magic economies, but rather as the tricks and sleight of hand techniques deployed by Islamic finance experts.The initial iteration of Islamic finance in Malaysia relied on stratagems that transformed impermissible contracts into ones deemed halal by Islamic scholars. Today, amidst widespread criticism of these techniques, experts seek to reform Islamic finance and in so doing create a spiritual economy characterized by the ethical practices conducive to neoliberal action: entrepreneurship, risk calculation, and cost‐benefit analysis.Back coverPillars supporting the Bank of England. The Bank of England has a small staff of regional agents assessing economic conditions in the field by means of a ‘network’ composed of 9,000 contacts in business and finance communities as well as in governmental and non‐governmental agencies. These interlocutors are continually in conversation with scores of their own contacts, creating an enormous epistemic apparatus that extends the field of intelligence gathering far beyond the shores of the UK. In this issue, Douglas R. Holmes examines the magic of central bankers' talk, i.e. how the efficacy of monetary policy rests on the representational enterprise, the ‘thick description’, of these contacts with whom the Bank of England must orchestrate the contingencies of financial stability and economic growth.