IDB adviser wins COMCEC award

M. Umer Chapra, a prominent economist and adviser at the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, has received the COMCEC award in recognition of his outstanding academic studies focusing on Islamic economics and finance.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is also chairman of COMCEC, presented the award to Chapra during the 30th annual conference of COMCEC in Istanbul recently.
Chapra, who is author of several books, has previously received a number of other awards, including the King Faisal International Award in 1990 for economic studies.
Chapra has been serving as an adviser at the Islamic Research and Training Institute (IRTI) of the IDB for the last 15 years. Prior to joining IRTI in November 1999, he worked at the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA), the central bank of Saudi Arabia, as senior economic adviser for 35 years.
He has taught in the US as assistant and associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, and the University of Kentucky, Lexington. He has delivered lectures at a number of universities around the world, including the Harvard Law School, the London School of Economics and Kyoto University.
He has made seminal contributions to Islamic economics and finance by writing 11 books on the subject and presenting close to a hundred papers and book reviews. His latest book is “Morality and Justice in Islamic Economics and Finance” published by Edward Elgar, a British publishing company.
The Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (COMCEC) is the main multilateral economic and commercial cooperation platform of the Islamic world. COMCEC serves as a central forum to address the common development problems of the Islamic Ummah and provide solutions to them. As one of the four standing committees of the OIC, COMCEC was established in 1981 by the Third Islamic Summit Conference in Makkah/Taif.
It became operational at the Fourth Islamic Summit Conference in Casablanca in 1984, with the election of the president of the Republic of Turkey to its chairmanship and convening of its first ministerial level meeting in the same year. COMCEC has 57 member countries as well as 5 observer countries spread over four continents.