EARLY ISLAMIC CHARITIES AS CATALYSTS OF INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION

Islamic societies may appear unsuitable catalysts for fostering individual enterprise and institutional innovation. This view is challenged by examination of the evolution of charities in early Islam, the so‐called waqf . Mohammed's prescription of providing alms engendered an extensive and varied range of charitable institutions. One example is the creation of Islam's earliest centres of higher learning, madrasahs . Key concepts of Common Law, such as trusts, may have copied Islamic legal concepts; the constitutions of the earliest colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities replicated the design of charitable madrasahs .