The Bindingness of The Promise in Islamic Law: The Case of Murabaha

Since the changes in social life bring with new issues in the economic life, many contracts today have different characteristics concerning to time period, certainty and phases of the contract. One of the characteristics is the formation of contracts of exchange relying on the promise. Nowadays, commercial organizations that provide worldwide service, build some of their transactions on promise. In these transactions parties make agreements in order to make commitments with regards to contracts (bay , ijarah etc.) that they will make in the future. When these commitments were considered as contracts, this would lead to forbidden activities in fiqh such as two sales in one transaction and sale of something that is not present, and therefore these transactions would not be permitted. For this reason, scholars have preferred to explain the commitment in these agreements as a promise rather than a contract. Therefore, as becoming an indispensable element of modern types of contract, promise has occupied an important place. However this new place in terms of contracts leads to the debate called bindingness of promise. Since it became subject to many discussions in Islamic finance in the 20th century, my aim is to focus on the issue of the bindingness of promise in the context of modern murabaha in Islamic law. In this light, the subjects covered are as follows: the debates about the bindingness of the promise, analysis of the opinions on the issue, kinds of religious and legal responsibilities that parties undertake, and the debate on promise through the context of murâbaha in the modern period.