Assessing Islamic Financing Efficiency in Uzbekistan: A Three-Stage Framework and Maqasid al-Shariah Criteria

Uzbekistan adopted a legal basis for Islamic banking in 2026, but no Islamic bank or window has been licensed so far, and only microfinance organizations offer Islamic financing. This study asks how the efficiency of Islamic financial institutions can be assessed in such a nascent market and what the current evidence shows. A three-stage framework is applied: (1) CAMELS-type financial ratios, which can be computed now; (2) frontier methods (data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis), which require multi-year panel data that do not yet exist; and (3) a Maqasid al-Shariah index, for which evaluation criteria adapted to Uzbekistan are proposed. Stage 1 draws on official Central Bank statistics for 2025-2026 and benchmarks the results against Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The banking environment is well capitalized and highly liquid, but profit growth relies on non-interest income, provisioning absorbs a large share of the interest margin, non-performing loans rose during 2026, and loans exceed deposits by a wide margin. Islamic financing remains marginal and dominated by murabaha. Kyrgyzstan is the closest regional analogue. Its contribution is the first efficiency-assessment framework for Islamic finance in Uzbekistan and, to the author's knowledge, in the CIS region, together with five Maqasid-based criteria mapped to their data sources. For policy, the key implication is that frontier and Maqasid-based evaluation cannot begin until Islamic financing is reported separately and regularly.