Features of corporate law in Afghanistan

This article examines the influence of Sharia on Afghan corporate law through the combined operation of a constitutional clause prohibiting legislation contrary to Islam and a civil-law technique that directs courts, where statutory text is silent, to the general principles of Hanafi jurisprudence. It shows how this normative structure reshapes the assessment of corporate transactions, managerial decisions, and the financial architecture of business entities. Special attention is given to the role of Sharia not merely as a background value system, but as a substantive criterion for the permissibility of commercial activity, affecting debt financing, contractual drafting, the validity of constituent (founding) documents, and the limits of corporate autonomy. The analysis focuses on the prohibition of ribā, understood as the guarantee of return without exposure to entrepreneurial risk, and on mudarabah and musharakah as risk-sharing mechanisms that allocate profit and loss and thus operate as alternatives to interest- based lending. A comparative discussion of corporate law in Afghanistan, the United States, and continental European jurisdictions highlights the specificity of the Afghan model, in which formal commercial statutes coexist with Hanafi interpretive tradition and a relatively opaque judicial practice. The article concludes that Afghan corporate law is of a mixed character, since the validity of legal acts depends both on statutory rules and on conformity with public order and Islamic principles.