3.Included in the documents was a very interesting disclosure, in which he
stated, and I quote: ‘‘This is a finance contract.. .’’ Our response was,
‘‘If this is the real intent, what is the point? Why go through all these
changes and maneuvers?’’ He said that we needed this to be done in
order to be compliant with Shari’aa.We canceled his consulting contract. He reacted by saying that he was
not surprised, because he felt that we had no respect for scholarship! He is
still being invited to teach scores of European and Western bankers in train-
ing seminars, short courses, and conferences on how to structure ‘‘Islamic’’
contracts that would ‘‘comply’’ with Shari’aa. These are the same seminars
organized by the same groups that have controlled the ‘‘Islamic’’ banking
promotion domain with one goal in mind: presenting scholar participants
who will help promote the ‘‘Shari’aa-compliant’’ banking that conforms to
the methodology promoted and signed on by the very Shari’aa scholar
‘‘superstars’’ created by such promoters.
In another experience, one of our staff members was sharing the chal-
lenges we face as a minority in the United States with another ‘‘scholar.’’ The
staff member shared with the scholar that we all should be wise, honest, and
creative in order to offer true RF banking that would be based on Shari’aa
without violating the laws of the land and the U.S. banking regulations, while
at the same time offering real economic substance and an advantage to the
user of RF financing techniques. This scholar’s advice was that we get our-
selves a good lawyer who is well connected with the regulators and/or a re-
tired regulator—as they had done earlier, in another European capital—and
all would be taken care of. We shared with this scholar that in the United
States, it is not the usual practice to buy your way in; even if you were suc-
cessful, it would cost you a lot of money and result in many restrictions—as
happened in the aforementioned European country—that would render RF
financing a ‘‘joke,’’ something that satisfied the form but not the spirit and
the substance of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic value system based on Shari’aa.
While developing this LARIBA Shari’aa-based RF model, we had to
come up with solutions to the many challenges discussed previously in this
book and we had to merge many of the opposing undercurrents. The fol-
lowing is a list of the major guidelines used to develop the model:
&It should reflect and embody the real spirit and substance of Shari’aa.
&It should be based on Shari’aa (notice here the phrasebased on,not
compliant with) and not force-fitted, as is done in the Shari’aa-
compliant approach.
&It must reflect the benefit to the user when compared to the models used
by the riba-based system and the Shari’aa-compliant system.254 THE ART OF ISLAMIC BANKING AND FINANCE