Heaven’s Bankers

Irfan, a banker who has worked for the Barclays Group and Deutsche Bank, gives a primer on Islamic finance and its vexed relation to the global economy. As he discusses, Sharia law’s injunction against usury and its emphasis on social justice has long kept Islamic finance separate from Western banking structures, which are seen to rely on debt and aggressive pursuit of growth. The rise in wealth in Muslim nations, however, caused major banks to begin pursuing Sharia-compliant investment vehicles in the early 2000s. Irfan outlines his experience re-envisioning Western-style banking services for the Islamic financial market, beginning with his time at Deutsche Bank in 2006. He describes how respected Muslim scholars were enlisted to lend credibility to the project, even as traditional Sharia-derived principles were bent almost to the breaking point. Irfan gradually became disenchanted, concluding that Western financial mechanisms are inherently incompatible with Islamic law. The amount of detail here requires both a keen interest and at least a passing familiarity with the terminology used. That said, this is an intriguing look at the possibilities for modern financial instruments that aren’t traditionally Western in design. (Mar.)