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Commodity murabahah has received extensive exposure since the Islamic financial industry shifted from bay’ bithaman ajil for its banking and financial products. The muamalat based contract which is innovated from the classical tawarruq with certain modifications has proliferated in many of the retail products in Malaysia including home financing. This paper analyses the financing facility offered to Malaysian homebuyers to investigate the extent of safeguards present in the facility when there are project abandonments. The operation of commodity murabahah as practiced in Malaysia for houses under construction are discussed and analysed with respect to their operations to know whether they conform both in form and substance. The analysis is done via library research while semi-structured interviews on operation of the facilities are done with experts in the field. The study finds that the commodity murabahah facility catered lacks the necessary safeguards for customers of Islamic banks. This can further aggravate the situation of homebuyers who have no proper recourse when their under constructed houses are left abandoned by developers. The paper calls for a more Shariah based oriented facility for houses under construction which is close to its muamalat nature in order for the rights and obligations of parties involved in home financing be inherent.

Soil is of particular interest to the forensic community because it can be used as valuable associative evidence to link a suspect to a victim or a crime scene. Liquid chromatography is a powerful analytical tool for organic compound analysis. Recently, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has proven to be an efficient method for forensic soil analysis, especially in discriminating soils from proximity locations. However, ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC), which is much more sensitive than HPLC, has never been explored in this context. This study proposed a UPLC method for profiling non-volatile organic compounds in three Malaysian soils (red, brown and yellowish-brown soils). The three soils were analysed separately to assess the effects of individual chromatographic parameters: (a) elution programme (isocratic vs. two gradient programmes); (b) flow rate (0.1 vs. 0.2 mL/min); (c) extraction solvent (acetonitrile vs. methanol) and (d) detection wavelength (230 vs. 254 nm). The injection volume and total run time were set to 5 µL and 35 min, respectively. Consequently, each soil sample gave 24 different chromatograms. Results showed that the most desirable chromatographic parameters were (a) isocratic elution; (b) flow rate at 0.2 mL/min and (c) acetonitrile extraction solvent. The proposed UPLC system is expected to be a feasible method for profiling non-volatile organic compounds in soil, and is more chemical-efficient than a comparable HPLC system. Supplemental data for this article are available online at. Key points UPLC is a chemical-efficient analytical method for profiling non-volatile organic compounds in soil. Mobile phase rich in acetonitrile promotes separation of non-volatile organic compounds in soil. Isocratic elution is more desirable than gradient elution in producing a high-quality chromatogram.