Halal enough? Authority, authenticity, and accountability in American Islamic finance

This article examines how non-specialist Muslims in Chicago decide whether financial practices are “halal enough” when religious authority is dispersed and conventional finance structures everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show that Islamic finance in the United States operates as a lived field of evaluation organized around practical actionability, the credibility of religious-financial authority, and social accountability. I develop the concept of pragmatic consensus to explain how socially connected actors can converge on participation in a contested practice while continuing to rely on non-equivalent grounds of justification. Public-equity investing illustrates this pattern: participation becomes socially available even as investors disagree over screening standards, scholarly certification, permissible debt, purification, and the meaning of shariah compliance. These disagreements remain active within participation without converging into a shared account of legitimacy. Critics further question the independence of Islamic-finance certification and the field’s orientation toward individualized access to capitalist markets, invoking broader commitments to social justice, mutual aid, and collective uplift. The article shows how religiously contested practices can remain socially available without doctrinal closure and how such availability coexists with continuing struggles over who may define legitimate economic conduct and what Islamic accountability requires under secular-capitalist conditions.