Catastrophe - Dick Morris [119]
Shariah consulting firms such as Shariah Capital
Shariah Index Providers such as HSBC, Standard and Poor’s, Dow Jones and FTSE
Accounting firms
Software providers
Global banking institutions such as Barclays, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley Capital, Citibank, UBS, and Goldman Sachs457
The Center for Security Policy outlines the requirements that are usually demanded of financial institutions engaged in Shariah-compliant financing:
Avoidance of interest charges
Shared risk between parties
Avoiding investments in banned industries such as defense, pork, media, banking, alcohol, and insurance
The appointment of Shariah advisory boards to create and oversee the adherence of investments to Shariah
An obligatory donation of “tainted” revenue, which must be “purified” and given to Shariah-approved charities458
Alex Alexiev, an expert in Shariah law, notes that the supposed goal of Shariah-compliant financing is “to make it possible for Muslims to conduct financial transactions while observing Shariah prohibitions against lending at interest (riba), uncertainty (gharar), and forbidden products and activities such as pork, alcohol, gambling, entertainment, etc.”459
Of course, as Alexiev points out, it’s almost impossible to invest money without risk or interest. So Shariah-compliant financing resorts to subterfuge:
The Shariah experts that must bless these transactions, engage in all kinds of more or less transparent legal fictions, ruses, gimmicks and deceptive techniques. Ironically, in doing that, they engage in the age-old Islamic practice of legal fictions, known as hiyal, which was originally designed to make it possible to do business transactions while circumventing Shariah injunctions, [which] didn’t make much sense even in the early days of Islam.460
The first company to set up a Shariah-compliant fund was Dow Jones, which set up the world’s first Islamic market index in 1999. Now there are seventy separate Islamic indexes.461
Investor’s Business Daily has reported that “Wall Street is jumping into this hot new market [of Shariah compliant financing] oblivious to the risks not just to the bottom line, but to national security. It knows little about Shariah law and is turning to consultants to create ‘ethical’ products to sell.”462
The newspaper reported that “Citibank and Goldman Sachs, for example, are creating investment vehicles that cater to Muslim investors in order to grab some of the billions in management fees in the offing. These products include Shariah-compliant bonds, mutual funds, mortgages, insurance, hedge funds and soon REITs.”463
Dow Jones, and other mutual funds and financial advisers who set up Shariah-compliant indices, license the right to use them as an investment guide. Frank Gaffney explains that “The Dow Jones Islamic Index’s first customer was a Cayman Island company, which licensed both the use of the Islamic index and the Dow Jones name to create the Dow Jones Islamic Index Portfolio.”464
Institutional compliance with Shariah law is a slippery slope. Today it means not investing in any company that makes pork. But it also means not putting your funds into any company that makes weapons for the American or Israeli military. Tomorrow, Gaffney speculates, it might be used to require companies to have “footbaths in public institutions, prayer rooms and time off for prayers in both public and private sector establishments, latitude for cabdrivers and cashiers to decline to do business with certain customers or handle certain products, an Islamist public school in Brooklyn, etc.”465
But beyond the money Shariah-compliant funds channel into terrorist groups, the very propagation of Shariah law as a legitimate way to regulate our society runs directly counter to our most elementary conceptions of personal freedom, equality, and social justice. Shariah law requires a lot more than a certain diet, the avoidance of pornography, and limits on interest income. Gaffney points out some of its other inconvenient requirements, which call for “beheadings,