Islamic finance is growing in various parts of the world. It has moved from a mere theoretical concept to a practical reality. A natural consequence of this progress is the opening up of new challenges as well as more avenues for its advancement. Islamic finance is therefore confronting some new and some old, but re-formulated, challenges on the intellectual and practical plains. On the intellectual side, refinements in the philosophical underpinnings of the Islamic finance and the financial system are the core issues. While on the practical side, the diversity of regulatory, supervisory and legal environments faced by Islamic financial institutions; the issues of a proper accounting framework; corporate governance; and making available of a complete spectrum of Islamic financial products have evolved as some of the new challenges. These challenges require going back and forth between the drawing board and the reality. Consequently, this approach is reflected in a good number of conferences and research assignments undertaken by IRTI. The present volume is a collection of selected papers from a conference jointly organized by IRTI and Universiti Brunei Darussalam in 2004. The conference was unique in its inclusion of some educational lectures on Islamic law (fiqh) of finance for orientation purpose along with sessions devoted to presentation of research papers in Islamic banking and finance. Both categories of presentations were important in their own right. However, the editors felt that the information content of the first category (the orientation lectures) will find its own currency and circulation because lectures by nature are repeated and their information content shared more widely. It is the research papers category that may need support of editing and publishing for broader circulation and knowledge preservation. The editors have therefore put together mostly this second category of papers in this volume. I hope that the readers will find these useful; and that the papers will help in creating further knowledge in the field.