The long-awaited agreement is a standardised form for Islamic derivatives transactions, which could free market participants from having to draw up the extensive documentation required for Sharia-compliant transactions from scratch.

Farrukh Raza, founder and managing director of Islamic Finance Advisory and Assurance Services in Birmingham in the UK, said it would take time before most market participants used the document. Many companies will have it reviewed by internal lawyers and their own Sharia scholars before acceptance.

He said it was too early to judge whether the agreement would lead to more transactions being executed.

Tariq Al-Rifai, director of Islamic market indexes at Dow Jones Indexes in Dubai, said his reaction was one of caution and that: “It may not lead to anything significant.”

But many believe the agreement will eventually help the industry.

Habib Motani, a partner at Clifford Chance in London who specialises in derivatives, capital markets and financial markets, said: “My hope and expectation is that it should give a boost to the market. The agreement will help increase the number of transactions and put people more readily into a position to do deals.”

The standardised agreement may pave the way for Sharia-compliant derivatives to be traded on exchanges.

However, Motani said exchange-traded derivatives were unlikely to be developed immediately and would come “a little way down the road”. He said the way murabaha was practised today was “not ideal from a Sharia point of view” and that a lot of scholars were “unhappy”. Murabaha is one of the commonest Islamic finance structures and is sometimes used in quasi-derivative transactions.