• MCC president says Islamic banking an attempt to deprive Canadian Muslims of benefits
WASHINGTON: Another controversy involving what is being billed as an “Islamic” practice has sprung up in Canada with the progressive Muslim Canadian Congress opposing the so-called shari’a-ordained banking that the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation wishes to have studied with a $100,000 grant.
In a letter to the Mortgage And Housing Corporation, the president of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) Farzana Hassan writes, “Islamic Banking is nothing more than an attempt by Islamists, with backing from Middle Eastern financial institutions and their Western partners, to scare Muslim Canadians into believing that they should pay more to the banks and demand less in return as an act of religiosity. Sharia Banking is an obscene attempt to fleece an already marginalised Muslim community while promising them the exact opposite. On the one hand, Imams are warning Muslims of hell fire if they deal with the existing banking systems, and on the other, the same clerics are being paid by banks to herd Muslims towards a system that is based on lies and deception. What we need is a better deal from the banks for all Canadians, rather than dividing us up into religious groups and pacing obstacles in the way of better integration of all Canadians. Our banking system has developed in Canada over the last 200 years, and there is no need to adapt it to the failed economies and medieval systems modelled on Saudi Arabia and Iran.”
Hassan regrets that some Canadian banks are succumbing to the lure of easy money that comes from supposed interest-free banking where customers receive zero interest on their deposits while paying more to the banks.
“While the banks and their paid imams and sheiks will make handsome returns, Muslim Canadians will end up as losers, with promises of rewards in the afterlife. Religion has no place in the banking or mortgage industry and banks should desist from employing imams or sheikhs who sanctify so called Islamic bank products and mortgages. We are not living in the middle ages to get our financial cues from clerics claiming guidance from the divine.” She quotes from a book by Muhammad Saleem, a former chief of the Park Avenue Bank in New York, who wrote, “Islamic banks do not practise what they preach: they all charge interest, but disguised in Islamic garb. Thus they engage in deceptive and dishonest banking practises.” Another study by two New Zeland professors concluded that the effort to introduce sharia banking “has promoted the spread of anti-modern currents of thought all across the Islamic world. It has also fostered an environment conducive to Islamist militancy.” According to them, “Our study, however, provides new evidence, which shows that, in practice, Islamic deposits are not interest-free.” They concluded that the rapid growth in Islamic banking was “largely driven by the Islamic resurgence worldwide.” khalid hasan
• Daily Times, 1/2/2008
