Pious Property provides an anthropologist's-eye view of how Muslims in the United States realize the home-ownership aspect of the American dream. Between the Arabic glossary and the index, this short work tackles the subject based partly on interviews with people involved in the “Islamic mortgage alternative” market, including customers and prospects, and partly on promotional material, as well as detailed analysis of statistical reports from federal agencies.

After a readable introduction to mortgages in the context of the Semitic religions, Maurer digs deeper into the Islamic tradition. However, despite alluding to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi's recent acceptance that Muslims outside the Islamic world may out of necessity become involved in bank interest, there is no mention of al-Qaradawi's earlier criticism of the controversial fatwa on the same topic issued in the late 1980s by the former Mufti of Egypt, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi.

The research proper revolves around two anonymous Muslim-run institutions. One offers an ijarah contract, effectively a hire purchase agreement. The other markets a murabaha contract, an arrangement comprising payment of the cost plus a “profit fee” “that is competitive with the interest rates available in the broader home finance market”. Unsurprisingly, this matches, dollar for dollar, a standard, fixed-rate mortgage. As if to underline that the “un-Islamic” interest-incurring transactions and the “Islamic” equivalents are effectively identical twins, the latter adopted and given new names, both use standard forms but with a codicil to the effect that, for “interest,” one should read “profit fee.” The same procedure applies for those who wish to reclaim tax on the interest they have (not) paid. What makes such – one might argue – chicanery all right for Muslim American home-buyers is the approval of shariah boards, whose signed, fatwa-style declarations adorn the information packs and websites of the various finance providers.

In chapter 6, mention of innovations in securities, or sukuk (coincidentally the same word as used in Arabic for the “indulgences” of Martin Luther's day), reminded me of my time as a Library of Congress selection officer, when the Cairo Book Fair of 1997 yielded up a bevy of Islamic Development Bank publications, all in Arabic but for the references, which were almost exclusively to American sources. Casting further doubt on the Islamic origins of these contracts, Maurer quotes an unnamed shariah scholar describing as “miniscule” the penetration of mortgage alternatives before their post-9/11 backing by agencies linked to the US Federal Reserve.

The ideal of “sharing the risk, spreading the profit” is equated with, “in the vision of some American Islamic bankers, spreading peace, justice, and the American way of business”. But the notion of “risk” here appears largely theoretical. Do Islamic banks share the risk with Muslim home-buyers who lose their jobs or their businesses go bust and they cannot pay? Maurer does not say but, judging by what has gone before, the thoughtful reader will probably conclude that “A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.”