U.S. treasury taps into Islamic finance

photo credit: booleansplit

Since when did Islamic finance get connected with terrorism?  Next thing you know, we’ll open up a newspaper tomorrow that links halal meat to terrorism.  Anything’s possible these days with Islamophobics running around trying to scare the masses of hollow claims.

The article, U.S. Treasury teaches “Islamic Finance 101″ was a bitter-sweet experience for me.   On the one hand, it’s a positive step in the right direction.  But on the other, the article presented some serious false statements about the tenets of Islamic law that any knowledgeable person about Islam would be able to detect easily.

People just use scare tactics when they are ignorant.

You gotta wonder why the U.S. Treasury wants to teach Islamic Finance in the first place.  Isn’t THAT what the main point is here? People follow systems that are proven to be successful, and what’s so successful about Islamic Finance? 

Here are some key rules:

1. No interest or usury allowed [1]

     Benefit: Bridge the gap between the rich and poor.

2. Ethical products and services only [2]

     Benefit: Become socially responsible.

3.  You must have gold in your possession before selling it [3]

     Benefit: Stop inflation of the dollar.

photo credit: purpleslog

What these principles do is put more importance to ethical business trading and the value of a dollar.  Otherwise, you have the rich compounding their money every second without working hard for it while the average person is working 14 hours per day making chump change.

To some extent, you will always have rich and poor and that’s normal.  But with systems in place like zakat, obligatory alms charity, income redistribution is secured and everyone’s happy — and peaceful.

Some people will argue that this is economic suicide – I say trust in God’s plan over man’s plan.  Isn’t this how we got into the financial crisis to begin with?

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Footnotes:

1. “…That is because they say, trading is only like usury; and Allah has allowed trading and forbidden usury…” (Quran 2:275)

2. Islamic Finance has to be free of products like pornography, gambling, alcohol, etc. 

3.  It is said that when money stopped being backed up by gold in the 1970s, economic inflation became very unstable because governments can just print more and more money so it became valueless.