Saudis Seek ‘Sharia bail out’ To Financial Crisis

Saudis seek ‘Sharia bail out’ to financial crisis
Middle East Online
Saudi clerics promote Islamic finance as healthy alternative to current troubled market economy.
By Habib Trabelsi
PARIS
While ministers and major financiers of major rich countries try to stem the panic of the global financial turmoil, imams of mosques, economists and writers stress that, from Saudi Arabia, Islamic finance is the only remedy against the successive black days.
Imams-preachers: Islamic finance is the solution
The shock wave from the financial catastrophe has not spared the imams of most mosques in Saudi Arabia. They used the crisis to spread in endless praise Islamic finance which is based on the ban of interest (riba), speculation, and sharing the risk and profit between contractors.
These features of Islamic finance, highly reviewed in the wake of the financial tsunami, have been at the center of Friday’s prayer sermons (October 10), whose extracts were reproduced Saturday by local newspapers.
Several imams and khatibs (preachers) have shown, more or less skillfully, the benefits of applying the principles of Islamic finance, which according to them, could provide a healthy alternative to the current market economy.
Islamic finance will triumph … “delight” set aside
“Communism will be eradicated in fifty years. Capitalism, too. Only Islamic finance will continue,” said Dr. Said Al-Awiss, Imam and preacher of the Iskan mosque, in Dammam (east) in the daily Al-Watan.
He pointed out at having developed this idea in his sermon, which was devoted almost exclusively to the crisis, particularly the “riba”.

Sheikh Abderrahman Al-Raqib, president of the courts in the southern province, told the newspaper that he had urged imams and Muslims “not to revel on the economic situation of Westerners caused by recent collapses (…) and to focus on praying that Muslims will not bear the outcomes.”

Islamic finance is emulated in the West
The Saudi press has largely given way to economy writers and columnists and economists.
The General Manager and board member of Arab Finance House (Beit al-Tamwil al-Arabi), Nadim Fuad Matragi is eager that the crisis has spared Islamic banks, calling them “safe shelters for cash” because “they are inherently immune against such crises.”

The Islamic economic analyst, Dr Ahmed Al-Islambouli, focuses on the root causes of the “failure of the capitalist financial system (…) which sins dude to its selfish vision that privileges interests of a particular category (of society), while Islamic finance is based on fairness.”

Writer-journalist-economist Dr. Abdel Hafidh Mahboub, cites examples that “Islamic finance is the appropriate solution to the global economic crisis.”

Mahboub gives as “evidence (…) the direction of Great Britain to become a hub for Islamic finance (…) and the recent trend of several Western countries to incorporate some principles of Islamic finance” in the current economy market.

Vincent Beaufils to the rescue

Shortly after the outbreak of the financial disaster on the Black Monday September 15 at Wall Street, which never ceases to spread, several newspapers – not only in Saudi Arabia – as well as Internet forums, have given themselves a perverse pleasure to lavish praise of Islamic finance…. wrote the French editorialist Vincent Beaufils.

He wrote an article published in the business magazine “Challenges” where he said that “if our bankers, avid of return on equity, had respected a little of Sharia, we would not be here.”
The article, in which the editorialist called for the use of Islamic finance, translated in Arabic, has spread around the Arab world and sparked an avalanche of lauding comments on forums and other Arab blogs.
Al-Azhar University does not remain on the sidelines
The Saudi daily Al-Madina also announced that the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo was preparing to organize a symposium on the global financial turmoil “from the Islamic point of view” to which “a great number of economic experts, academics and clerics” were invited.

Citing Dr. Abdelhalim Mohamed Omar, director of the organizing center, the newspaper said that “the conference aims to work towards the implementation of Islamic Shariah as the solution to break the international financial crisis.”

Wild Thing’s comment…….
The Saudis can take their money, their thinking and their cult of Islam and put it where the sun does not shine. They are the last thing our country needs.