 In this module, we shall look at the global Sukuk market. This module would not be about a particular structure, but rather we would be looking into the opportunities, prospects and to some extent challenges facing the global Sukuk market. It is a fact that there is now a thriving Sukuk market on a global level. The players involved in Sukuk market range from government, corporate, charities, multilateral institutions and some other organizations. So this is an instrument which is becoming of interest to an increasing number of organizations and sectors. As I said previously in a module that even the likes of United Nations, World Bank, IMF and the regional development banks they have been involved in one way or the other in the global Sukuk market. In Pakistan, Sukuk are issued on a regular basis by the government of Pakistan. The current government has made this as a regular feature in the Pakistani capital market to issue Sukuk. These Sukuk are bought by not only Islamic banks but by conventional banks and other bodies as well. The importance of Sukuk in the context of Pakistan is that now it is being used as an effective tool for liquidity management by the institutions which are involved in Islamic banking and finance, particularly the fully fledged Islamic banks. Also the conventional banks involved in Islamic banking and finance, they find it useful to use Sukuk as a liquidity management tool. What is liquidity management? Many banks may have excess funds that they were not able to use for financing, financing like car financing, home financing in the form of personal finance facilities available to the customers and so on, otherwise in other words the banks were not able to deploy all their funds. In that case, this excess liquidity, the money available to them, that can be used to invest in government issued Sukuk. This is an excellent facility to Islamic banks which previously were finding it difficult to find Sharia compliant assets for their liquidity management needs. This is actually the case in a number of other countries as well. Like in Malaysia, government issues, a number of instruments including Sukuk which can be used for liquidity management purposes for Islamic financial institution. In Bahrain, Sukuk Assalam is regularly issued by the central bank of Bahrain, allowing Islamic banks to manage their liquidity effectively and in a Sharia compliant way. Let us look at the global size of Sukuk market. Sukuk market was very, very negligible at the start of the century. They were very few Sukuk issued by governments and by corporates, but for the last 10 years there has been a heavy emphasis on the use of Sukuk for raising money from capital markets. For example in 2012, the total amount of Sukuk issued was 137.17 billion on a global level. In 2013, 14 and 15, these 3 years, the market actually did not see any positive growth. The Sukuk issuance in these 3 years actually went down from one year to another one. Since 2015, Sukuk market has become very violent. In 2016, 74.8 billion US dollars were raised using different Sukuk structures, a figure which went up to nearly 100 billion. Then in 2018, it went up to 112.4 billion. In 2019, just before COVID, the market finished 162 billion worth of Sukuk issuance and at that time it was believed that that was the highest point which the industry or the market could have achieved. Then came COVID-19 and the industry was very nervous and many people thought that in 2020, the global Sukuk market would dry down. But the market surprised everyone. At the end of 2020, the total new issuance of Sukuk was over 174 billion US dollars. This shows that global Sukuk market has now actually become a sustainable market. There have been in the past some fluctuations in case of issuance. After the last 6-7 years, the industry has attained a status whereby every passing year the size of the industry is going up and up. I must end this module with the relative importance of Sukuk in the global Islamic financial services industry. The total size of the global Islamic financial services industry is about 2.941 trillion US dollars, nearly 3 trillion US dollars and the global Sukuk market is about 16-17 percent of it. So, it is a significant proportion of the global Islamic financial assets and the industry pundits believe that this 16-17 percent share of the market held by Sukuk is only going to go up.