Bachelor Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Economics - History, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim (Fakult?t der Rechtswissenschaften und VWL), language: English, abstract: Since the mid-1970s, an industry growing at considerable pace in the Islamic world is gaining market shares all over the world in countries with sufficient Muslim populations. This "Islamic Finance" industry claims to act in line with the ethical and practical principles set forth in the Qu'ran and the Shari'ah, thus appealing to Muslim and non-Muslim clients alike who search for viable alternatives to conventional financial products. As explained, the first beginnings of this phenomenon can be traced well back into the 1970s when the first "Islamic Banks" started operating in Egypt and Jordan. In the past decades, a vast amount of research has been published - empirical and theoretical - to review the impacts of Islamic Finance on the financial markets of the Islamic world. These works, to a great deal inspired by the enormous need of the industry for quantitative and qualitative research, all dealt with questions of comparative efficiency of conventional and Islamic Finance, the demand for Shari'ah-compliant financial products, the actual genuineness, or authenticity, of the industry, etc. However, only a very small portion of these research works dealt with the question whether or not the Islamic world actually needs Islamic Finance. At first, this might seem as a triv...