Abstract:
Islamic finance industry has been widely developing not only in Muslim countries such as
Malaysia and Bahrain but also in non- Muslim countries such as Sri Lanka. At the same time,
the Shari’ah governance is one of major requirements for Islamic financial institutions to be
recognised by the Shariah and the Muslim customers. As such, the Shari’ah governance
plays a significant role in the industry to ensure that it meets the objective for the
establishment of the Islamic financial institutions. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to
investigate the level of Shari’ah governance of Islamic financial institutions in Sri Lanka,
Malaysia and Bahrain. Hence, this is a comparative study among three countries. The
research paper adopts a qualitative method and content analysis in order to accomplish the
objective of the study. The data for the study is based on the primary and secondary sources
that could be collected from Parliamentary Acts, books, articles, magazines, online materials
and annual report of Islamic financial institutions available in the above three countries. The
findings of the study are expected to be greatly useful for the Islamic financial institutions in
Sri Lanka and similar countries where there is no proper legislation on Shariah governance.
