There is nothing wrong with Islamic Finance

Submitted by Malik (United States), Jan 8, 2010 at 08:16

Daniel,

I was listening to your commentary on the Middle East Forum on 12/01 in New York City in regards to Islamic Finance and how it's an "Islamist" practice. There is nothing "Islamist" about not charging interest. What business is it to anyone how the Muslims do business with each other? If we don't want to charge interest in our businesses, so what? It doesn't hurt the economy and it's a transparent transaction without interest exponentially accruing on one side of the business transaction.

Most of our business is done via a profit sharing mechanism, the same profit sharing system that billion dollar Venture Capital firms use. Why aren't you calling them Islamiist too? In regards to your headline about "being careful", if I listed the amount of rogue financial investment firms on Wall Street that thieved there way to the top through a broken financial regulatory system and corporate welfare (ie. Citibank, Bank of America, AIG, etc) I would have hundreds of pages. There are many Islamic institutions that have not done an injustice to any of their customers, and as you know there will always be "bad apples". Islamic financed or not.

I think you should read This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff or A Nation Deep in Debt by James Mcdonald. Fractional Reserve Banking and fiat currency is the only tools that have propped up the U.S economy since 1913. The Second Great Contraction (Reinhart) would of been the Second Great Depression had the U.S government not "printed" their way out of it. Although it didn't make the headlines like it should the U.S. had a de facto default in in December of 2009.

Had the House not raised the debt ceiling for the next 2 months it would of been catastrophic for the U.S economy. When I'm done I'll forward you my future post on what Islamic finance truly is so you can get more insight into the smoke and mirrors capitalism that has been going on in the U.S economy for the last 100 hundred years. In addition it will give you more insight into what Riba is. There is nothing Islamist or extreme about it.

Malik Abdul Rasheed, Bronx, NY

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