Take Islamic finance into the woods and shoot it in the head
It gets me every time, that scene where George shoots Lennie in the back of the head. You know the one, right? I get a lump in my throat and hope the kids don’t see.
Poor Lennie, he meant no harm. Pure, innocent, naive. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone.
“Tell me again about the rabbits, George!” A child-like wonder for cute furry things. But dangerous. Difficult to control. Eventually you have to do the right thing.
Islamic finance is my Lennie. I love it. Really I do. A child in a man’s body. So seemingly harmless. I looked after it, fed it, nurtured it, stayed with it and defended it to the end.
But there has to be an end. It’s now. Islamic banks must die. I, we, tried to bring them up, tried to save them. We tried to do the right thing.
Muslims get it. They know about the sin of riba (interest). It’s heinous: it ranks in the faith alongside the taking of human life and disbelief in God. And despite this, they’re still banking with conventional high street names. They’re not buying into the charade that is Islamic banking. In the UK, where there are 3 million Muslims, only 2% of Muslim households hold a bank account with the largest Shari’a compliant retail bank (there are a couple of others offering a very limited range of retail products).
I know why this is. I’m the janitor who sweeps the bank floor, I’ve seen and heard everything.
In the forthcoming articles, I’m going to expose the hypocrisy, greed and abject incompetence of the mediocre dinosaurs whose only goal is to feather their retirement nests. And while I enjoy a good rant, I’m a practical man, not a theoretician. So in the fullness of time I shall offer some solutions based on real life examples. Not abstract concepts, like a bunch of university academics and theologians sitting around in a workshop circle jerk, referencing each other with bullshit footnotes. (Yeah, that happens a lot in this industry).
So if you’re a Muslim who needs access to pensions, home financing, savings products, investment funds, student finance, small business financing, ask yourself, am I being served? If you work in Islamic finance, especially the banks, ask yourself is this what I really hoped Islamic banking would be?
We’re living in a make believe world, for the few not the many. Islamic finance was always about the real economy, not the replication of the socially useless, steroidally-enhanced financial economy. What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it. In the words of Morpheus, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more. I can only show you the door, you’re the one that has to walk through it. So take the red pill with me.
Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ‘cause Kansas is going bye-bye.
