Religious Challenges of Islamic Banking in Nigeria

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country; more than 50% of its total population of well over 170 million people is Muslims. Majority Nigeria’s citizens are living below the poverty line mainly due to the problem of financial inclusion. The central bank of Nigeria attempted to increase the financial inclusion so as to curve the problem of liquidity management and also reduce the gap between the have and have not. Islamic banking becomes a better alternative because of its prohibition of interest and profit and loss sharing principles. The introduced Islamic bank has been confronted with a number of challenges that are religiously based. Descriptive method has been adopted in this paper to outline these challenges and enumerate on their causative factors. The paper concludes that serious measures are to be taken to make improvement and to proffers way out to the challenges.