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Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

economist.com

1–10 of 163 posts

Re: Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

#7
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to click and see the article, and I'm not a subscriber.

I’ve reached the limit too. What does modern banking have to do with religion?

I've reached mine, too. From what I understand you can't lend with interest and you can't lend what you don't own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking_and_finance).

Re: Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

#8
post #4

How is this on Hacker News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

Re: Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

#9
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to click and see the article, and I'm not a subscriber.

I’ve reached the limit too. What does modern banking have to do with religion?

The article says that Muslim financing tradition prevents banks from paying interest, and they must instead share their profits. In recent years this has been higher than the meager interest offered by banks' traditional savings accounts, so it is attracting non-Muslims at a growing rate. There is some debate as to whether all of these products technically fit the definition/custom--as some banks are advertising a certain rate of return through profit sharing, making it very similar to interest.

Re: Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

#10
Very interesting--I had never heard of this before.

It seems the higher interest rate is predicated on finding investors who want to take loans at higher-than-market-clearing rates. Does anyone have any insight into why non-Muslims are getting loans through these banks? I don't see how this scales to consistently provide higher returns, especially as more money moves into this system. Are tobacco and alcohol related loans failing at a higher rate than the rest of the market?

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