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Islamic finance is a fast growing segment of international financial markets. Deriving its core principles from the Quran and the Sharia, the objective of Islamic finance is to install a more equitable financial and economic order that at the same time is transaction-friendly. Thus, Islam could be seen as a foundation for the inclusion of the ethical and moral dimensions of economics and markets. This coincides with rising demand for Islamic financial products. Indeed, recent years have witnessed increasing efforts to develop and to institutionalise Islamic capital markets and above all, to make Islamic finance acceptable (and thus investable) to the mainstream. In this article, I use the question of legitimacy to explore whether Islamic finance offers an alternative to the existing international financial order. To this end, I take a closer look at the knowledge base from which Islamic financial products are constructed and …