Shariah Banks Thrive in Previously Secular Turkey
Shariah-compliant finance is a key component of the Islamization process and no where is this more apparent than Turkey, which, until just over a decade ago, was a largely secular nation.
Today Turkey is ruled by an Islamist regime, the Gulenist movement is taking over its security services and, predictably, Shariah banks are popping up everywhere…
Once a negligible sliver of the banking industry, Islamic financial institutions which keep within Islamic Sharia law, are now gaining support in Turkey, a secular republic since its founding in 1923.
This month the Turkish government – controlled by the conservative Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) – issued banking licenses to two new Islamic banks.
The licensing is a move to expand so-called “participation banks” that use Sharia-compliant financial methods…
The new banks will join four Islamic banks that comprised more than 5% of the Turkish banking sector. That is leaps and bounds from where the Islamic banks’ piece of the Turkish banking sector was when it emerged in the 1980s, struggling for attention. “It always had a small share,” Atilla Yesilada, an Istanbul-based consultant with Global Source Partners, an economic and political consultancy firm.
Turkish clients initially viewed the banks with skepticism as being linked to the Arab world. The government was also far from supportive of the banks, according to Yesilada.
Changes in Turkey’s economy and politics since 2002 when AKP took power, however, have helped the sector to grow.
And the emergence of Shariah banking in Turkey is accompanied by the usual false propaganda to attempt to get non-Muslims to bank in a Shariah-compliant way:
The banks may also prove attractive to others as well. “For non-Muslims who partake in Islamic banking it fits in with ethical ways of conducting businesses…let alone those who fear running out of business or at worst losing their business and remain indebted by having to still pay the interest incurred,” Yusha’u said.
This statement implies that Shariah banks lend money for free, which is, of course nonsense…but what Shariah banks DO is promote Shariah.
http://themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=37795
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