The Contagion Spreads: Qatar Islamic Bank has $15 mln exposure to Dubai World
Qatar Islamic Bank has announced that it faces exposure in the evolving debacle emanating from Dubai. This is particularly bad news for this institution since, back in March, it was in serious enough trouble to have been bailed out by the regime in Qatar: https://shariahfinancewatch.org/2009/03/10/qatar-to-prop-up-its-banking-system/ $15 million doesn’t seem like a great deal of exposure, […]
Some in the financial world are being forced to admit that Shariah compliance offers no increased protection against crisis than any other method. Some are even admitting things like the fact that the legal systems in Islamic countries are not mature enough to support sophisticated financial derivatives, such as Sukuk (Islamic bonds). Still, in reading […]
David Yerushalmi is one of America’s foremost experts on Shariah and Shariah-Compliant Finance. Anyone with an interest in this topic should read anything and everything Mr. Yerushalmi has written on the subject. This morning SFW provides a link to his latest work as published by National Review…an especially timely piece which puts the Dubai debacle […]
Just a few days ago, the Kuwaiti News Agency (KUNA) was proclaiming that Islamic banking was thriving in Lebanon. It appears that all is not actually so great in Lebanon when it comes to Islamic finance, but we won’t hold our breath waiting for KUNA to report this story. It seems Hezbollah has gotten its […]
The Banker points out problems with Shariah Finance
The British publication “The Banker” has mostly been a cheerleader for Shariah Finance for several years and they have written an article which, while viewing Shariah Finance in a positive light, also points out some of its serious flaws: • “Greed and selfishness” exist in Shariah Finance just as they do in conventional finance. This […]
Linked below is an article by a man named Arthur MacDonald in which he repeats the myth that “moral” Shariah-Compliant Finance has provided protection against the economic crisis. We regret to inform Mr. MacDonald, but Shariah Finance is neither moral, nor a protector against economic crisis. Consider that the world’s largest Shariah-Compliant financial institutions are […]
The promoters of Shariah Finance have now coined a new term to hide their agenda and describe their movement: “Responsible” investing. To do so, they erroneously claim that “Islamic” financial products have provided insulation from the financial crisis and global recession. This, of course, is rubbish, as we have reported on these pages many times. […]
Feds Move to Seize Alavi Assets, Aiming at Iran, Bank Melli (World’s Number 1 Shariah-Compliant Bank)
Yesterday the US attorney’s office in Manhattan moved to seize assets of a non-profit foundation tied to Iran. Among those assets are four mosques in New York, California, Maryland and Texas, 100 acres of land in Virginia and a 36-story building at 650 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Much of this activity centers around the ties […]
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blasts free market capitalism at OIC economic conference
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a featured speaker at the Organization of the Islamic Conference economic summit about which we reported on 9 November: https://shariahfinancewatch.org/2009/11/09/islamic-state-leaders-converge-in-istanbul-for-economic-summit/ In his address to the summit, which some so-called US “allies,” Ahmadinejad called for a replacement of capitalism by an Islamic system of economics. This makes sense since Iran has […]
I for one am glad I don’t own a “piece of the rock.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/6509447/Prudential-starts-Sharia-compliant-fund-management-business.html?
TIMELINE-Defaults: Islamic finance in uncharted territory
The dirty underside of Shariah-Compliant Finance… http://www.reuters.com/article/bankruptcyNews/idUSKLR44503820091105?rpc=401
Douglas Farah on Iran’s Expanding Latin American Reach
Douglas Farah is one of America’s most valuable experts on the subject of Jihad and the financial aspects of Islamist terrorism. On Friday, 23 October, Farah posted an excellent article on Iran’s continuously growing activities in the Western Hemisphere, with a particular emphasis on Iran’s inroads into the financial services sector in Central and South […]
Increased provisioning for bad loans and a decline in income from investments have led Bahrain Islamic Bank into a quarterly loss. Bahrain’s biggest Islamic retail bank by market value said on Wednesday provisions for impairments in the third quarter increased more than threefold to 2 million Bahraini dinars ($5.31 million) from 600,000 dinars in the […]
According to a study issued by Asian Banker Research magazine, the world’s foremost terrorist-sponsoring nation, Iran, dominates the market for Islamic banking. Iran holds seven out of the top 10 rankings and 12 out of the 100 top Islamic banks, the magazine said. More than 40 percent of the total assets of the top 100 […]
A Shariah-compliant co-op in Australia is being billed as an “ethical” alternative for investors, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. This is typical of the marketing and public relations efforts surrounding Shariah finance. Members of the industry itself openly discuss ways of marketing Shariah Finance to non-Muslim investors as “ethical investing” while excluding any reference to Shariah […]
CNN has published a piece on Islamic finance. It may as well be a marketing brochure. This article is so irresponsibly written that you won’t even find the term shariah anywhere in the article, despite the fact that shariah is the doctrine underpinning Islamic finance and despite the fact that it is shariah scholars who […]
One of the bogus tenants of Shariah-Compliant Finance is the supposed rule that forbids investing in companies that produce weaponry. We know from the Iranian experience that this ban only applies to companies that sell weaponry to the West, and not to companies that sell weaponry to Islamic nations, though this is never mentioned in […]
Dow Jones Indexes is set to launch four new indexes for the Middle East and North Africa region, giving investors access to both conventional and Shariah compliant indexes. Note that this index will focus on Saudi Arabia and the standards will be aligned with Wahhabism, the official state religion of Saudi Arabia–and Al Qaeda… http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=26203
South Africa’s third largest fund management company, Stanlib, has put on hold plans to launch a global equity Islamic fund. http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKL456474320090804?rpc=401&&pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
At SFW we have maintained all along that Shariah-Compliant Finance is not merely a tool with which pious Muslims can properly practice their religious principles, but rather a form of financial jihad with which the Jihadists can gain leverage over Western civilization and make us “play by their rules.” We recently found stark evidence of […]
Less than a month after the introduction of a Shariah-Compliant Exchange Traded Fund in the USA, there is now a report that a similar fund will launch in Canada soon… It may be simply an oversight, but the language used to describe the criteria for this new ETF in the article linked below is slightly […]
We wonder if anyone at Dow Jones even knows what Shariah is… “Dow Jones has launched a new Islamic index, which has been simultaneously licensed to an exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider in the US. The Dow Jones Islamic Market International Titans 100 Index will track 100 companies outside the US which have passed sharia screening […]
Richard Shulman has a very good, concise article on The Examiner web site today which covers some of the troubling aspects of Shariah-Compliant Finance, and particularly the Saudis’ role in funding terrorism… http://www.examiner.com/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner~y2009m6d18-Saudi-charity-as-a-form-of-warfare
Once again, at a meeting of Shariah advisors, promoters of Shariah-Compliant Finance are telling lies to convince the world that Shariah-Compliance offers more safety and higher ethical standards than conventional finance. It’s simply not true… http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsgeneral.php?id=419104
For some time now, promoters of Shariah-Compliant Finance have claimed that their products offer a safer, more “ethical” alternative to traditional financial products. In fact, they’ve come up with contrived instruments to make Shariah-Compliant Finance more palpable to non-Muslims. An example is the sukuk market. Sukuk are popularly known as “Islamic bonds” and, as one […]
Subsidized Shariah
Today’s editorial from The Washington Times… http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/01/subsidized-shariah/
S&P goes dhimmi in Canada
Standard & Poor’s is launching an index of large Canadian stocks with criteria defined by Islamic law… http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/sp-starts-canadian-stock-index-defined-by-islamic-law/article1155197/
FTSE and the Stock Exchange of Thailand have added a Shariah index to the exchange’s benchmarks. This is most unfortunate and is illustrative of the spread of Shariah worldwide. This is especially disconcerting in the case of Thailand, which has been racked by a bloody Islamist insurgency over the past several years. One cannot help […]
Shariah-Compliant Finance is based on Shariah, sometimes referred to as “Islamic law.” This fact alone makes the issue of settling disputes in transactions involving Shariah-Compliant Finance problematic and it is an issue that the industry has not addressed and seems poised to be stalemated over. Note also that in the article linked below that a […]
This week, CNN and Money magazine ran an article focusing on the role of faith in the personal finances of certain families. In the article which they published which deals with a Muslim family, we have discovered a whole slew of questions with regard to matters outside of personal finance which, not surprisingly, the lapdogs […]
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