One of the overt objectives of the financial jihadists has always been to capture the assets of non-Muslims in Shariah-compliant investments and accounts. They have used a wide variety of methods to do so. For instance, Sheikh DeLorenzo, who is on several major Shariah advisory boards in the USA and abroad, has advocated for not mentioning Shariah or Islam in disclosure documents, but merely referring to Shariah-compliant investing as “ethical investing.” Some financial institutions have in fact taken DeLorenzo’s advice on this and are actively misleading customers in a way that conventional investment organizations could never get away with.
But another way that Shariah financial institutions are capturing Western, non-Muslim capital is to offer higher yields than their non-Shariah compliant competitors.
A word of caution is in order here. Higher yields almost always indicate higher risk. There is just no getting around that rule of thumb. If a bank is offering a substantially higher yield on a deposit account than its competitors, it simply must be doing something “extra” to achieve that higher yield. That something extra almost always entails higher risk.
In the case of Shariah-compliant banks, there are additional risks as well. For instance, the risk that a portion of your money will end up going to support Jihad through some sort of zakat arrangement.
Of course, the financial jihadists who push Shariah-compliance so hard in the West very often want us to believe that Shariah-compliance bestows some sort of mystical safety and security on an investment product, bank deposit or financial institution. The rash of defaults and missed payments on Islamic bonds (sukuk) should be all the evidence we need to debunk that bit of fraudulent propaganda…
Islamic banks now provide the best returns on cash deposited for two, three, four and five years – and these market leading rates are encouraging more UK customers to put money into sharia-compliant accounts.
Since advertising savings rates of up to 4.8 per cent on comparison sites such as Moneysupermarket.com, the Bank of London and the Middle East (BLME) has seen a fourfold increase in customer deposits.
“The demographic of our investors is in fact mostly non-Muslims,” said Nigel Denison, executive director of BLME, one of the main providers of Islamic finance in the UK.
Razi Fakih, deputy chief executive of HSBC Amanah says “Non-Muslim customers like the ethical stance that the accounts take.”
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/bf1ead2c-ee63-11e0-a2ed-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1aBc8uFNM
