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Looks like -as you can imagine- that they are very happy with the system:

As the buzz around the industry grows, so do expectations. The amount of Islamic assets under management stands at around $700 billion, according to the Islamic Financial Services Board, an industry body. Standard & Poors, a rating agency, thinks that the industry could control $4 trillion of assets. Others go further, pointing out that Muslims account for 20% of the worlds population, but Islamic finance for less than 1% of its financial instruments that gap, they say, represents a big opportunity. With tongue partly in cheek, some say that Islamic finance should by rights displace conventional finance altogether. Western finance cannot service capital that wants to find a sharia-compliant home; but Islamic finance can satisfy everyone.

 

Confidence is one thing, hyperbole another. The industry remains minute on many measures: its total assets roughly match those of Lloyds TSB, Britains fifth-largest bank (though some firms that meet sharia-compliant criteria may attract Islamic investors without realising it). The assets managed by Islamic rules are growing at 10-15% annuallynot to be sniffed at, but underwhelming for an industry that attracts so much attention. Most of all, the industrys expansion is tempered by its need to address the tensions between its two purposes: to serve God and to make as much money as it can.

 

That is a stiff test. A few devout Muslims, many of them in Saudi Arabia, will pay what Paul Homsy of Crescent Asset Management calls a piety premium to satisfy sharia. But research into the investment preferences of Muslims shows that most of them want products that benefit their savings, as well as their soulsrather as ethical investors in the West want funds that do no harm, but are also at least as profitable as other investments.

 

A combination of ingenuity and persistence has enabled Islamic finance to conquer some of the main obstacles. Take transaction costs which tend to be higher in complex Islamic instruments than in more straightforward conventional ones. Sharia-compliant mortgages are typically structured so that the lender itself buys the property and then leases it out to the borrower at a price that combines a rental charge and a capital payment. At the end of the mortgage term, when the price of the property has been fully repaid, the house is transferred to the borrower. That additional complexity does not just add to the direct costs of the transaction, but can also fall foul of legal hurdles. Since the property changes hands twice in the transaction, an Islamic mortgage is theoretically liable to double stamp duty. Britain ironed out this kink in 2003 but it remains one of the few countries to have done so.

Islamic finance | Savings and souls | Economist.com

Read the rest: it is a very interesting article. Even if they are not opposed to the system, the explanation is accurate and not very difficult to understand.

As MEMRI’s Turkish blog reports (from August 26, 2008), the “fast disappearance” of restaurants in the important mountain resort of Uludag, is now being followed by another demand of Arab Muslim tourists to the region: the reduction of the number of passengers per cable car from 40, to a maximum of 25. Safety concerns, perhaps? Hardly! Arab Muslim tourists are insisting (via their travel agents) that they not be placed in too close proximity to “foreigners,” i.e., non-Muslim kaffirs /infidels, lest they have “…any bodily contact with their women and girls.” To accommodate their Arab clients’ anti-infidel bigotry, the Turkish AKP governed Bursa municipality has begun to impose these changes, extending a cable car line to the area of the hotels, and also declaring that this new line will include both “VIP” and sex-segregated (read Islamic sexual apartheid) cars as well.

Thanks to Andrew Boston’s blog.

Well, if they don’t want “infidel” tourists, why they keep on advertising Turkey as a marvellous destination for holidays… in Infidel countries? Oh, there’s the money, and whether it’s infidel or not, it’s good…

But that’s not all: you must read ALL the post, because it also contains what Fetullah Gullen, a very important Turkish islamist was saying in 1999:

“You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers… until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria… like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete, and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it… You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey… Until that time, any step taken would be too early – like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all – in confidence… trusting your loyalty and sensitivity to secrecy. I know that when you leave here – [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here.”

that’s not all, go there and read it all.

The important question is, has that time already come?

Because they fear Labour is going to suffer a huge defeat in next elections. According to last surveys, Conservatives would have 44% of the vote, nearly 15 points more than Labour. h/t 31 da armada.

Nietzsche said “God is dead”. Looks like the religious deranged syndrome is not. Really, for a religious person this is an insult: if you want to live your religion, live it and leave others live theirs. Oh, and I never liked Nietzsche:

The Missionaries of Charity are again in the crosshairs of the fundamentalists: yesterday, September 5 – the anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta – four sisters of Mother Teresa were attacked by about 20 Bajrang Dal activists at the Durgh train station in Chhattisgarh, a state in central India. The Hindu radicals forced them off the train, and then handed them over to police officers while chanting anti-Christian slogans.

The Hindu fundamentalists accused the sisters – Sr Mamta, the mother superior, Sr Ignacio, Sr Josephina, and Sr Laborius – of the “kidnapping and forced conversion” of four children between one and two years old, whom the religious were taking from their home in Raipur to the Shishu Bhava charity center in Bhopal. The activists followed the women to the police station, “insulting them and chanting slogans against the Christians“. The sisters presented all of the identification documents for the children and their travel permit, in addition to other documentation brought later by the religious from the house in Bilaspur. In spite of this documentation, the children were taken to be housed temporarily at the government hospital in Durg, while the documents and identity papers presented by the sisters are verified by the judicial authorities.

“The mob threatened to beat us up, but I was not afraid”, Sr Mamta tells AsiaNews. Her only concern is for the children, who require care and assistance, “but most of all our love. We love these darlings like our own, that is our pain”.

Christians again assaulted by Hindu extremists | Spero News

We will see what happens in the end, but India is one of the countries who has a higher rate of poor people, specially due to its caste system, which forbids the lower castes’ from going up in society. One of the worst social sins you can commit is to convert to another religion where the caste system is not recognised. That is why mainly Christians and Bhuddists are assaulted regularly.

Last assaults have happened against Christians, such as the one in the state of Orissa.

It is curious that this particular attack has been made against Nuns of Charity, nuns who are famous precisely because the serve “the poor among the poor”, those who no other care about. The people dying alone, the abandoned children, people with VIH, cancer or other terminal or very grave illnesses, etc. When Mother Theresa arrived there, she was also confronted by Hindu nationalists who claimed she was showing bad publicity of Calcuta because she only talked of the poor and the ill. Of course they didn’t add, that no other cared about them. And that no one was asked to convert to Catholicism, as nuns were doing it out of charity, because the saw Christ in every man, woman or child who was taken care of.

I have seen them in action, not in India where I haven’t been but in my hometown. It is a song to the soul. Anyone who is open to goodness, whatever his/her vision about God, can only feel greatness in what they do. The attack only speaks badly about the attackers.

Read also: In India the Christians’ Offense is Fighting Against Slavery.