Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2019), anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the Malaysian state, led by the central bank, is seeking to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Beyond Debt tracks efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria.

Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.