The implications of sharia finance in the UK
Melanie Phillips
The huge spread of sharia finance should cause us the greatest possible
concern. It is seen as relatively untroublesome way of reaching out to
Muslims while making some people a very great deal of money. So
everyone is happy? This couldn’t be further from truth. It fails to
understand that this country doesn’t just face Islamic terrorism but an
attempt to colonise Britain for Islam through the spread of sharia and
the most extreme interpretation of Islam.
sharia finance is based on a fabrication. Contrary to what we are told,
sharia does not proscribe interest. It proscribes usury. We can see
this is so because Islamic countries have used and still use interest.
The Ottoman Empire used interest; so did religious organisations with
in that empire. Interest is permitted even in Saudi Arabia. In 1981
Sheikh Tantawi, the prominent Islamic legal authority at al Azhar
university Cairo issued a fatwa justifying the charging of interest.
What has to be understood is that sharia finance is based on a
fabrication because it is simply a jihadi strategy to help Islamise
Britain’s institutions and society.
The idea of sharia finance is a relatively contemporary innovation
invented by Islamists bent on jihad against the non-Islamic world. It
was not until the mid-20th century that ideologues like Abul ala
Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb advocated sharia finance as element of a
separate, self-sustained Islamic order with its own Islamic ideology,
Islamic politics and Islamic economics that taken together would
guarantee an Islamic way of life and ultimately the Islamic state as
the first step toward establishing Muslim rule worldwide.
The actual driving forces behind the establishment of Islamic banking
in the 1970s were the huge windfall profits that accrued to Saudi
Arabia and other Gulf oil following the 1973 oil embargo and the
dramatic spike in oil prices that followed it. Suddenly endowed with
unprecedented amounts of money, Saudi Arabia dramatically accelerated
its drive to promote itself as the leading country of Islam and export
its radical Wahhabi creed worldwide by using its new financial clout.
Indeed the Muslim Brotherhood ‘Project’ document, which was discovered
by police in Switzerland in 200, mandates the creation of ‘special
Islamic economic, social and other institutions’ to fund the spreading
of fundamentalist Islam.
Sharia finance is a beachhead in the attempt to colonise British
society for Islam. Acceptance of sharia finance furthers the Islamist
objective of gradually legitimising sharia more generally in the west.
The point of sharia banking, which is being missed by all those who can
only see the prospect of making a lot of money from it, is that all who
use it must conform to the dictates of sharia. Sharia financial
institutions may not be making this clear now – they don’t want to
frighten people away – but at some point that IOU of sharia-compliance
will be called in. This is how they will spread sharia to both the
Muslim and non-Muslim population. Any Western institution that endorses
sharia-compliant products therefore endorses the Islamist ideology
behind it, whether they know it or not.
The most important point to grasp is that Islam recognises no authority
superior to sharia. Sharia banks will therefore not recognise the
superior authority of the law of the land. When trillions of pounds and
dollars are locked into them, who will argue with them?
There are already examples of sharia regulations overriding commercial
decisions. Citibank, for example, launched the Saudi American Bank
(SAB) in Jeddah and its Riyadh branch in 1955 and 1966 respectively,
apparently without considering business risks under sharia. The Saudis
abruptly seized SAB in 1980, denied Citibank all future profits, and
ordered the bank to train Saudi staffers because the bank was judged
insufficiently Muslim.
Shari'a laws grant the Islamic ummah supremacy over all others -- along
with all land and property, to hold in trust for Allah. Under sharia,
land or property conquered or acquired by Muslims cannot generally
revert to its original owners. Under sharia, confiscating the property
of unbelievers is considered justifiable.
Even more troubling is the cover provided by sharia finance for the
financing of terrorism. Sharia requires Muslims to tithe a percentage
of their money to charity (Zakat). But charity in Islam is more like
solidarity and only weakly differentiated therefore from militancy or
jihad. Some money donated to Islamic charities thus finds it way to
organisations promoting jihad and supporting suicide bombing including
Hamas, Hezbollah, the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and
Islamist madrassas in places like Pakistan.
Next, the people making the decisions about where this money is sent
are themselves jihadis or terrorism supporters. Only certain Islamic
authorities are entitled to issue the religious rulings or fatwas that
can recognize investments as Sharia-compliant. These include the Fiqh
Academy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, which is associated with the
Saudi-dominated Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC); the
European Council for Fatwa Research, and the Fatwa Council of North
America. All of these entities are associated with the radical Wahabi
and Salafi schools of Islam adhered to by groups such as al Qaeda and
Hamas.
These people funnel the zakat money into terrorist organisations.
Radical cleric and jihad ideologue Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi is recognized
as an expert in Shari'a-compliant investments. So is Sheikh Muhammad
Taqi Usmani, a radical Pakistani cleric who ran a madrassa that trained
thousands of Taliban, sits on the Shariah supervisory board of the Dow
Jones Islamic Index Fund, which is run by the North American Islamic
Trust—a Saudi-tied alleged front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The US
Justice Department last year named the Islamic Trust an unindicted
co-conspirator in a major terror-financing case.
Similarly, the groups that these organizations spawned for the express
purpose of overseeing sharia-compliant investments and the people
authorized and recognized as Islamic authorities capable of declaring
an investment sharia-compliant are identified with political Islam and,
in several cases with terror financing and support.
Members of the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic
Financial Institutions include the central banks of designated
terrorist states Iran and Sudan---and the Saudi Dallah al Baraka Group,
al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation, Kuwait Finance House -- all
implicated in funding al Qaeda, according to former U.S. counter-terror
official Richard Clarke in testimony before the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks upon the U.S. And the Islamic Financial Services
Board members include the central banks of Iran, Sudan, Syria, and the
terror-funding Palestinian Monetary Authority (PMA).
In Britain and elsewhere, the sharia advisory boards in British banks
contain several individuals with links to jihadi and terrorist
organisations.
In addition, the absence of transparency inherent in Islamic banking
systems makes such money laundering difficult to track.
In conclusion, few financial institutions seem prepared to engage in
even the most superficial due diligence about the implications of
Shariah finance. The spread of sharia finance in Britain and the west
is therefore the height of reckless corporate irresponsibility.