talk about serendipity. i asked a regular visitor, himy, what his site islambank was all about. here is his highly interesting reply:

Being Muslim, we don’t eat pork nor consume intoxicants nor should we deal in RIBA, of which Usury (a Latin word meaning ‘simple interest’), is a major component. Being an observant Muslim, I decided in my teenage years to focus on this neglected area of civil society: Interest-Free Living.

this raised my interest immediately. having been schooled to accept interest as something fundamentally inherent to the financial system, i wondered how could this work?

I kept attending arcane and not-well known Islamic Banking conferences around the world, and every time, I was usually the ‘only’ person in attendance who was not connected to a central bank, or an Islamic Bank, or an NGO, or a regulatory official. So finally, after getting fed up of answering the same questions over and over and over again, I stepped back. On Christmas Day 1997, I plopped down the money and founded IslamBank.COMmunity.
I’ve worked at the Islamic Housing Co-operative here in Toronto, which was one of the first interest-free home financing operations in the Northern World. Today, there are close to 300 Islamic Financial Institutions worldwide. Many in the US as well.
Regular Usurious Banks now have ‘islamic windows’, which are either subsidiary companies which operate completely in line with Islamic Law (The ‘Shariah’), such as CITI-Islamic or HSBC-Amanah Finance, or your country’s NoRiba which falls under the UBS Group umbrella.
In your country, SWATCH was financed completely under islamic financing principals after determining that interest-based financing could not allow their business plan the time necessary to kick the Japanese watch Industry’s ass back after taking 60% of the worldwide watch market from the swiss watch industry, which at one time produced 90% of the watches in the world.

so there are interest-free banking activities underwritten by UBS as well. asked about what bahrain had to do with it

That tiny island has become the ‘Wall Street of Islamic Finance’. Every major Islamic Banking concern with Global aspirations must have a physical presence there to be taken seriously.

i had heard of hawala before, so my first reaction was to associate interest-free banking with it, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. still digging..

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