It really gets tedious when clerics of various religions see the hand of God in every disaster. It doesn’t matter what the disaster is; it doesn’t matter what the religion is, there is always someone ready to see God’s getting angry with mankind and teaching a lesson. It can be the tsunami of 2004, earthquakes, or—as in this case—the global economic crisis. ‘It happened because you weren’t listening to God’ is the call.
Statements like this really trivialize religion, again, no matter the religion. To believe that God smites evildoers with economic pain, or even with natural disasters demeans the concept of God.
Now to be fair, it’s entirely possible that there are some aspects of Islamic finance that might have helped avoid the current crisis. ‘Derivatives’, for example, have no place in Islamic finance and they do seem to have played a significant role in the housing crisis, at least. The effort to monetize bad mortgages by packaging them up into opaque investment instruments was clearly—in hindsight—a bad move. But having a better or safer way of doing things is a far cry from having God hurling thunderbolts to impress good ideas on humanity!
Saudi mufti says credit crunch due to ignoring God’s rules
Saudi Arabia’s grand cleric on Sunday told Muslims on the hajj pilgrimage that the global financial crisis stems from ignoring God’s rules and allowing “riba” or usury, prohibited in Islam.
“Today we watch as this financial crisis enfolds and some companies and banks go bankrupt,” grand mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said at the Namera mosque, where prophet Mohammed prayed while making the pilgrimage.“This is the result of ignoring God’s rules. Muslims must abide by God’s rules, and build their economies accordingly,” Sheikh told the faithful before midday prayers.
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December:08:2008 - 16:12
Such strange statements, though lamentable, when covered by the press serve only to sensationalize and trivialize the issues facing the nation.
Of course it is sad to see statements like this, or similar statements by Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach in the USA, that ascribe divine actions to global events.
However, the real issue is not whether clerics ever, or even frequently, make outrageous statements.
All religions, with their claims to the supernatural, may seem outlandish to those who do not believe in that religion.
What is deserving of public discussion and concern is that such clerics perform governmental and non-clerical functions, such as serving as magistrates, judges, etc.
What may be viewed appropriately as a prophetic temperament in a cleric should be very different than the judicial temperament expected to be found in a magistrate.
December:08:2008 - 20:50
I have already noted this before, I am not sure if it was on crossroads or not. But this attitude that the Saudi Islam is all whats right in this world.. and because we follow it we are safe from god wrath is just heretic by it’s self. That without it.. the world will spiral downwards into destruction and vice.
This point needs to come to the front.. I am sick and tired of people fearing fairy tale wrath threats. They keep bantering about it whenever they hear news of disaster of somewhere else. They scare the ignorant fools who nod with them with those baseless claims… If you have any basic consideration to science and logic you will understand those phenomenons and learn from others mistakes. Instead they glee with false twisted view of others justifying what happens to them is God’s punishment.
December:10:2008 - 05:22
They have credit cards in Saudi Arabia. They charge an annual fee, plus they charge a percentage of the carry-over balance. I did the math on one and came up with an equivalent of 22% APR. And unlike in the evil outside world that uses usury, in Saudi Arabia the APR is fixed. Everyone that carries a balance pays 22%. And everyone pays an annual fee for having the card. Basically this means that you’re charged for having a card, even if you don’t use it, and you’re charged a pretty high APR if you carry a balance. So that imam should be holding up a mirror to Saudi society instead of fueling xenophobic sentiments. (ie, the world “out there” is filled with un-Islamic usury.) Of course, he wouldn’t do that, because the second he railed against Saudi banks issuing credit cards he’d be ousted and sent to some rinky-dink mosque outside of Shakaka. I really wish Saudis would be more self-aware of these issues. These religious leaders continue to fuel xenophobia while being restrained from overt criticisms of their own system. That’s getting kinda old. As a Pakistani cab driver once told me, without oil Saudis would have dates, camels and clink and they would all be living in tents cutting each others heads off. (He said it, not me.) I don’t agree with that, but I get what he’s saying: they got enough issues to work on at home.
PS: Usury had nothing to do with the global financial crisis. The global financial crisis was caused by American “financial geniuses” creating economic weapons of mass destruction in the form of credit default swaps plus a corrupt bonds rating system.
If anything caused the crisis was insurance (which is basically what credit default swaps are). I’m not sure what the Islamic fundamentalist thinks of insurance, but my guess is if it doesn’t involves reading the Quran all day long it’s evil.
Also: It was clever of him not to criticize Muslims who might have profited in the past few years on this house of cards. After all, he wants to keep his job.
PPS: I heard the imam of the Grand Mosque is chauffeured around in a cherry red Mercedes. If true: CLASSY! I wonder what car the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) would have been chauffeured around in.
December:10:2008 - 09:03
I have read–I’ll look for a link–that ‘Islamic credit cards’ find a way around the usury argument by charging fixed fees and a bit of redefinition. Rather than interest per se, it’s a fixed cost (that’s why it’s invariably a high cost) of doing business that’s passed on to the consumer, i.e. credit card holder.
I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of how this is done, other than to note that it is done, specifically to avoid charges of usury.
PPS: I’m not getting into WWMD! The WWJD was tedious enough, thank you very much.
December:10:2008 - 13:33
OK, OK. I take that back the WWMD thing then. . . but still. Men of God who emulate prophets and preach that everyone should pattern their lives on prophets and their teachings from oh-so-long ago should probably try to live like them. (I think it’s Al-Asheikh that has the cherry red Mercedes — and, yes, I think it’s fair to criticize a Salafist fundamentalist of such material expressions. If they were true to their words, they’d live the Amish. After all, that’s the whole point of being a Salafist — to reject modernism and live like the first generation of Muslims.)
I saw a SABB credit card application. It had an annual fee plus a 1.5% carry over charge clearly printed (albeit in tiny font). These cards don’t even semantically pretend to not be charging interest. And this is all over the banking system. Samba’s rather exorbitant wire-transfer fees are also based on the amount of money you transfer, not a flat fee. In any case, flat fees are used as excuses to shaft consumers — if they used interest, they’d actually be paying less! The whole thing is ridiculous: flat fee, interest, same difference, really. They just jack up the fees, often to a level higher than what you would pay if they just charged interest. In many cases this is worse usury than charging interest.
December:10:2008 - 15:56
I’m not really arguing with you…
There are some cards that don’t use interest, instead using a complicated formula and the words that are Sharia-compliant. Most credit cards are the same as everywhere else. And flat fees can be as onerous as floating ones, the only benefit being you know what you’re going to be paying before hand.
I live in a city with a sizeable Amish (Mennonite) community. They do eschew cars and move around town on tricycles, dress in traditional clothes, etc. They also run some great restaurants. The descendants who have fallen away are big in auto sales, politics, and everything else. They might be a good model for Salafi preachers.