Cumhuriyet İlahiyat Dergisi

Öz

Crowdfunding is a contemporary method of financing where an entrepreneur with a project or an idea of business finances his/her project by raising funds from the crowds through an open call made on an internet platform. This method is more of an alternative mechanism for generating financial sources, enabling entrepreneurs who do not have rich financial sources, who find it difficult to provide collateral required by traditional financial sources, and who do not have without enough experience or recognition to do business. This method has four basic types of funding; namely, donation-based, award-based, share-based and loan-based. This study aims to present the fiqhi (jurisprudential) aspects of these by addressing the crowdfunding method based on these four basic types. The research on the subject was carried out through analysis of concrete events and documents, and fiqhi judgments were attempted for each sub-topic through analysis and synthesis methods. As a result of the conducted research, the following basic conclusions were made with fiqhi justification: In donation-based crowdfunding, the support provided by the funders to the entrepreneurs is a typical act of granting. In terms of award-based crowdfunding, the practice of funding that includes intangible awards, such as sending a congratulatory or thank you card, is also an act of granting. The practice of awarding items of material value, albeit at a low level, such as hats, T-shirts and key rings, is a contingent-consideration type of granting. As for the pre-emption/presale practice, where the funder is given the right to pre-order the product to be manufactured, it is a contract for work, i.e. a contract for work. In the share-based crowdfunding, the type of partnership corporation established with the funds provided by the entrepreneur and the funders of the entrepreneurship company is joint stock equity partnership (‘inan), in which the partners share equally in the profit or loss with varying levels of tenure. In loan-based crowdfunding, the entrepreneur’s practice of borrowing from the investors and repaying without any interest is a typical loan process, but the practice of repaying the debt with the predetermined interest is a loan process with interest. Paying the debt borrowed from the investors with the shares of the company, is called istibdal in terms of fiqh, which means paying a debt not money but with something that can replace it. The istibdal terminated the debt relationship between the parties. However, due to the share taken from the company creates a relationship between the two parties. Provided that the field of activity is legitimate, in terms of fiqh, there are no problems in any of these practises, with the exception of the loan-based practice where the debt is paid with addedtional interest.