Sharia-compliant financing must stop

Turn your clock back 70 years. Imagine that Wall Street banks and brokerages sold Nuremberg-compliant bonds and stock funds in 1938. American Nazi sympathizers bought financial instruments certified by Berlin-based advisors as free of "Jewish profits" from, say, Salomon Brothers and Bloomingdale's. In turn, a percentage of such funds' gains underwrote pro-Nazi charities, like the German-American Bund, and similar organizations in the Fatherland, like the Hitler Youth.

Seventy years hence, an analogous outrage grows on Wall Street, only this time for real.

Sharia-compliant finance (SCF) is expanding among banks and securities houses eager to absorb the hundreds of billions of petrodollars cascading into the Middle East, thanks to $100-per-barrel oil. To lure this cash, financial companies increasingly offer vehicles that don't involve or benefit from anything considered "haram" or "un-kosher" in Islam - and SCF is not limited to the bond market. SCF also goes far beyond 'marketing' to Muslims and Middle Easterners. IIFM lists "wider sharia acceptance" among its goals..

Selling sharia-compliant investments legitimizes a barbaric theocratic orthodoxy that should be defeated, not promoted.

[Recommended]

READ MORE