Dubai, NASDAQ, Zakat, and Jihad
Charles Johnson
Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 6:54 pm PDT • Views: 866
Revisiting Dubai’s intention to purchase 20% of the NASDAQ stock exchange, Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen bring up some disturbing issues, centering around the Islamic practice of Zakat and its connection to the global jihad: Tithing for Terrorists.
Bourse Dubai began operating as the world’s first fully sharia-compliant stock exchange, in December 2006. Sharia compliance requires companies traded to also be sharia-compliant, and establishes a special tax on all the others to “purify” them.
The Islamic “purity” (Tazkiya) of Bourse Dubai was approved by the sharia board of the 1991-Bahrain-registered and based Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAIOFI). The AAIOFI laid the groundwork for the global Islamic financial network and regulates all Islamic financial organizations and products, including Bourse Dubai.
Like every Muslim country, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) collects mandatory Islamic charity (Zakat- the Third Pillar of Islam — an annual wealth tax), of about 2.5-percent from Muslim institutions and companies. Being non-Muslims, foreign banks and oil companies theoretically don’t pay Zakat. But foreign banks and oil companies in fact do pay 20 percent of their profits, but rather than Zakat, these mandatory payments are called “tax.”
Zakat we are told, is to help the needy. However, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader, Yusuf Qaradawi decrees, “Declaring holy war…is an Islamic duty, and fighting ….is the Way of Allah for which Zakat must be spent.” In his 1999 publication, “Fiqh az-Zakat,” Qaradawi adds,
The most important form of jihad today is serious, purposefully organized work to rebuild Islamic society and state and to implement the Islamic way of life in the political, cultural and economic domains. This is certainly most deserving of Zakat.And as previously demonstrated time and again, Muslim jihadist-terror organizations are indeed prominent Zakat recipients.
Frank says: