My Islamic Financing (Ijara or Murabaha) Is in a Dispute With My Bank

The right next step depends heavily on which of three different problems you actually have. An early-settlement or rebate disagreement and a profit-rate or late-payment-charge dispute are both money disputes about what your bank is entitled to charge — they go through the same complaint-then-Sanadak route as any other banking complaint. A concern that the product wasn’t really Sharia-compliant as sold is a different, harder question, because on the public record there is no confirmed customer route to challenge that specifically.

Separating these matters, because conflating them weakens a complaint. A letter that argues both "you overcharged me on early settlement" and "this product was never really Islamic" in the same breath is harder for a bank, for Sanadak, or for a lawyer to act on than two clearly stated points would be.

Collect the Ijara or Murabaha agreement itself, the payment schedule, any early-settlement or rebate calculation the bank has sent you, and correspondence about the profit rate or late-payment charge in dispute. If your concern is about Sharia-compliance specifically, also ask your bank for the product’s Shari’ah Certificate — under Article 11 of the CBUAE’s Consumer Protection Regulation, an Islamic financial institution must present you with adequate information about the product, including its Shari’ah Certificate, and grant you access to its internal Shari’ah function if you have doubts.

That access right is real and worth using — it is the closest thing to a dedicated customer-facing Sharia-compliance right that exists on the public record — but it is a right to ask and be told, not a right to a specific outcome. Keep a written record of what you ask and what the bank tells you either way.

Every escalation route described on this page assumes a formal complaint to the institution has already been made and given time to be answered — you generally can’t skip straight to Sanadak. State clearly what kind of dispute this is (early settlement, profit rate, late-payment charge, or a Sharia-compliance doubt), what you want the bank to do, and keep the complaint in writing so there’s a clear paper trail of when you complained and what response, if any, you got.

How long you then have to wait before escalating is genuinely unclear on the public record: some guidance points to 15 calendar days, other official material points to 30. Rather than guess, allow the longer period to be safe, and check the current figure directly on sanadak.gov.ae before you file.

Sanadak is the CBUAE’s Ombudsman Unit, established under Regulation No. 1659/2023 and continued today under Article 148 of Federal Decree-Law No. 6 of 2025. Filing a complaint is free. Its jurisdiction is defined by whether your bank is a "Licensed Financial Institution" — a term Regulation 1659/2023 itself expressly extends to institutions that carry on business in compliance with Islamic Shari’ah — so an Islamic bank should be covered on the same basis as a conventional one, even though Sanadak’s own consumer-facing pages never actually use the word "Islamic" anywhere. That is a real gap in Sanadak’s own public materials worth knowing about, not a reason to assume you’re excluded.

Once filed, Sanadak’s published process runs roughly: acknowledgment within three business days, a substantive response window for the institution of 30 complete business days, and a written decision once review is complete. Decisions up to AED 50,000 are treated as final; above that, you can appeal to the Court of Appeal within 30 days. A banking-side dispute committee equivalent to Sanadak’s insurance-side committee has not been separately confirmed — the material found only refers generally to "one or more committees" within the unit.

The CBUAE’s general early-settlement rule — Regulation No. 29/2011 as amended by Central Bank Board of Directors’ Resolution No. 96/By Circulation/2019 — caps an early-settlement fee at 1% of the outstanding balance or AED 10,000, whichever is less. Article 13 of that same regulation extends it expressly to Sharia-compliant banking services, carving out only how "interest" is computed (replaced by whatever profit-rate or cost-plus-markup method your Ijara or Murabaha uses), not a different, Islamic-specific numeric cap. If your bank has charged you more than that on early settlement, that is a concrete, citable point to put to it and, if unresolved, to Sanadak.

Separately, some regulatory material reportedly requires Islamic institutions not to charge an early-settlement fee beyond their actual costs incurred, said to trace to a Higher Shari’ah Authority resolution — but the exact wording of that specific rule was not consistently confirmed in the research behind this page, so treat it as a point to ask your bank or a lawyer to check directly rather than something to rely on as settled. The flat 1%/AED 10,000 cap above is the figure you can rely on.

This is the hardest of the three dispute types, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a reassuring one. UAE law gives an Islamic institution’s Internal Shari’ah Supervision Committee, overseen by the Higher Shari’ah Authority, exclusive authority to determine and approve a product’s Sharia-compliance — that relationship runs between the institution and its regulator, and no provision found in this research gives a customer standing to challenge that determination directly or a defined route to get a ruling on it.

What you do have, under Article 11 of the Consumer Protection Regulation, is the right to ask the institution’s internal Shari’ah function about your doubts and to see its Shari’ah Certificate disclosure. Whether a genuine Sharia-compliance failure could ever be grounds to void or unwind the underlying contract is a real, open legal question that this research did not resolve — it turns on how Islamic-law principles interact with general UAE civil-law contract rules, and it is exactly the kind of question a lawyer needs to assess on your specific contract and facts. Don’t assume either answer here; ask a lawyer.

There is no dedicated Islamic-finance dispute tribunal in the UAE. Where Sanadak doesn’t cover the issue — the dispute is already in litigation, or it turns on whether the contract itself is valid rather than on the bank’s conduct — the fallback is the ordinary civil/commercial courts, applying general Civil Transactions Law contract principles. The new Civil Transactions Law does not create a separate Islamic-contracts code; Islamic Sharia principles operate, where relevant, as a residual source a court can draw on rather than as a standalone statutory route of their own.

An arbitration clause, if your specific contract contains one, would route the dispute to arbitration instead of the courts — but that is a general contract point, not something standard to Islamic financing, and it shouldn’t be assumed unless your contract actually has such a clause. At this stage — litigation, a Sharia-compliance question with real money behind it, or simply a bank that isn’t engaging — an independent lawyer who handles Islamic finance or banking disputes is worth bringing in, and LEXNOVA can help you find one. LEXNOVA is not a law firm and does not itself negotiate with your bank.