A gradual convergence of Islamic finance towards interest-based conventional finance is one of the major concerns in the progress of Islamic finance. An important reason for this one-way convergence in the rates of returns of the two sectors is the dominance of Islamic banking in the composition of the Islamic financial sector. The investment account returns of Islamic banks depend heavily on interest rates. Whereas, Islamic stock markets are argued to be the essential domain to achieve true Islamic finance, since they are based on profit and loss sharing and are not directly dependent on interest rates. We in this paper investigate the relationship between the Islamic stock index and indicative interest rates in Turkey, using the daily data of Participation 30 index returns in Borsa İstanbul (BIST) and interest rates on indicative bonds between the years 2011-2015. We also include the BIST 100 index in the model as the control variable. The results of Maki cointegration test show that Participation 30 index is not cointegrated with interest rates, while the general index of Borsa İstanbul is significantly cointegrated with interest rates. Toda Yamamoto test based on Granger causality analysis shows that no causal relationship exists between interest rates and the Participation 30 Index, while the general index of Borsa İstanbul is influenced by interest rates. The findings provide evidence for the independency of returns on Islamic stock investments from interest rates. This result also proves that the Sharīʻah-compliant firms are less sensitive to interest rates due to their financial structure in which the interest bearing assets and sources are significantly limited.

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