re: #715 Charles

Hi, Charles,

Those laws exist at this snapshot in time. I bet the Brits thought they had laws on the books, too. Now they have 5 sharia courts that have substantially differing rules than non-Muslim Britons (in cases of inheritance, for example). They actually have different laws for those of a different religion. How can that stand? Well, it’s there and there’s apparently nothing the Brits can do about it.

Laws, and their interpretation, are constantly changing.

In the last few years, we’ve seen sharia finance operations start up in America by the likes of Citigroup, AIG, B of A, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley. Of course these banks want into the $1.5 trillion Muslim banking market, as it is growing by some estimates by 15% per year.

What’s wrong with this? You might ask. It’s quite simple: Islamic banking working through global banks is doing for Islam what it could never do on its own: giving legitimacy to Sharia law and infiltrating it into the fabric of western society.

I also submit, while not an issue today, the growing dependence on sharia banking clearly would put a bank’s “other customer” at peril. If a bank becomes too dependent on its Muslim depositors, it becomes a slave to those depositors. Kind of like TARP made the banks slaves to the Feds. But deposits are different. A bank can (and they are) live without TARP. A bank cannot survive without deposits.

Lastly, there is a shortage of sharia banking experts, so there is competition among banks to find such experts to sit on their boards of directors. By having an “expert” involved in banking decisions, this provides the legitimacy to each banking decision because it is made at the director level rather management level. However, many of these sharia “experts” are from the Wahhabi school of Islam in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and they hold views diametrically opposed to the basic values of Western civilization. In fact, I could make a case that they are openly hostile to the basic values of Western civilization.

Yousuf Quaradawi, who is prominent in the Muslim Brotherhood, owns two banks himself and has issued statements in support of Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens and has issued rulings supporting Hamas and Hezbollah jihad attacks against Israel. And he is banned from entering the US and UK.

Muhammad Yaqui Usami who is a radical cleric and Sharia court judge in Pakistan is an advisor to HSBC.

These are the kinds of people advising U.S. banks on how to conduct their business to assure they are “sharia compliant.” Add to that the fact that under sharia banking, these banks must donate 2.5% of revenue as zakat to Islamic charity, and one can see where the problems are to begin.