Capitalism is the cause of the global economic recession and an Islamic banking system is the only way to revive battered world economies, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday.
Addressing a one-day meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), Ahmadinejad said investment based on interests was usury, which "is entrenched in the capitalist system... and is perhaps the main reason why the system has gone bankrupt". "It is a way of accumulating capital without working. Usury, according to the holy Quran, is [tantamount to] fighting with Allah," said Ahmadinejad. Islamic banks operate on sharia law, which bans such investments. The banks instead make money using a system of profit-sharing from returns on approved investments. Islamic banks exist in all oil-rich Arab Gulf countries and in most Islamic states. Ahmadinejad did not mention Iran's struggling economy, nor did he refer to its dispute with the West over its nuclear activities. Somalia's President Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed also slammed the "wrongdoing and mistakes and absence of transparency" of international financial institutions in the crisis. President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan said he intended to turn his country into "a regional centre for the expansion of Islamic financing".
The $1 trillion Islamic finance faced difficulties during the global financial crisis but was relatively insulated because of Islam's ban on handling interest-bearing financial instruments.Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan also attended. Turkish President Abdullah Gul spoke on behalf of the developing nations in the OIC, despite the fact that Turkey has a western-style banking system. |