The globalised dual banking system of Saudi Arabia and Islamic banks: a struggle for authenticity

This study explores the divergence between Islamic banking’s ethical ideals and their implementation in Saudi Arabia, where global capitalist pressures and neo-imperial logics reshape local practices. Mobilising postcolonial theory, we extend its conventional focus on former colonies to a context never formally colonised. Saudi Arabia illustrates how coloniality persists beyond territorial conquest: through the adoption of Western regulatory frameworks, financial standards, and epistemic norms. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, we identify how international standards and local perceptions of Western superiority displace authentic Sharia-based financial practices, such as profit-and-loss sharing, in favour of debt-based products that mimic conventional banking. These dynamics institutionalise mimicry and erode the social and ethical distinctiveness of Islamic finance. Our analysis reveals displaced local practices to capture how indigenous modes of banking are marginalised within global financial architectures. The study contributes to the accounting and business ethics literature by demonstrating that postcolonial theorisation is analytically powerful even in non-colonised settings, and by highlighting the structural and ideological challenges that Islamic banks face in pursuing authenticity within a globalised financial system.