INDONESIA - ARTICLE - The Shari’ah Service in Indonesia’s Conventional Banking System

www.businessislamica.com - Tony Hidayat - In Indonesia’s banking industry the size of Islamic banking is still small. In January 2012, the assets of Indonesia’s banking industry reached Rp 3,598 Trillion, while the assets of Islamic banking at the same period only reached Rp 144 Trillion, or a share of only 4%.
One of the reasons behind this is the limited existence of an Islamic banking office network. An office network—which consists of a branch office, sub-branch offices and cash offices— is the center of banking transactions and the proximity of the bank becomes the customer’s dominant factor for using its banking services. In January 2012, the office network of national banking was up to 14,820 branches, while that of the Islamic banking only reached 1,943 branches. (source)

INDONESIA - OPINION - Insight: How Islamic are Islamic countries? A rejoinder

Prof. Komaruddin Hidayat, the rector of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN), wrote an interesting column in Jakarta’s leading newspaper on Indonesian Islamicity. His article is a rejoinder to a study conducted by Scheherazade S. Rehman and Hossein Askari from George Washington University.

Published in the Berkeley-based Global Economy Journal, Volume 10, 2010, this study examines if policies of the Muslim world were founded on Islamic teachings in comparison to those in non-Muslim countries. All up, 208 countries were studied. (source)