From a Financial Times Report:
Islamic finance might have been created by and for devout Muslim bankers and clerics, but big international banks have increasingly become the driving force behind the industry.
Final approval is still reserved for the boards of shariah scholars that all Islamic banks require to give them credibility, but services and products are often designed and structured by western bankers and lawyers.
But the global financial crisis has coincided with a fightback from the sharia scholars and “indigenous” Islamic bankers. Many feel that some of the industry’s innovation had led it to bend certain key precepts of Muslim jurisprudence to breaking point.
The most notable example was last year’s pronouncements by Sheikh Taqi Usmani – one of the industry’s oldest and most respected scholars – that many Islamic bonds went too far in mimicking conventional, interest-paying bonds, which are banned by Islam…
While this Financial Times report does essentially accurately portray the conflict within Shariah Finance between the Shariah scholars and the Western financial services industry so eager to aid in the financial jihad, it glosses over something that absolutely CANNOT go overlooked:
The author, a Ms. Robin Wigglesworth, refers to Mufti Taqi Usmani as “respected.” Any journalist worth her salt would have explored this issue further and sought to determine exactly why Usmani is so “respected.” Had she done so, Ms. Wigglesworth would have stumbled upon the ugly, dirty underside of Shariah finance.
Fortunately, SFW already did so months ago:
https://shariahfinancewatch.org/2009/02/27/hsbcs-shariah-man/
