wedded to explain in full detail the meaning of the marriage contract
according to the rituals and processes of the faith and to consult with
and agree upon the details of the process. It was also reasoned that what
makes a contract Islamic, Catholic, or Jewish is not only the religious cere-
mony and the religious wedding vows and rites pronounced, but also where
the couple goes if they have a dispute. If they seek religious arbitration, that
makes it a real faith-based marriage; if they seek the civil courts, that makes
it a civil marriage.
There are two important considerations that need to be included in the
development of the Shari’aa-based RF finance system:
1.That money is not rented. This stipulation is met by ensuring that the
property is marked to market.
2.That, in the case of a dispute, the contracting parties use a board of
arbitration that abides by Shari’aa. This makes the contract ‘‘faith-
based,’’ depending on the faith involved.Another important parallel experience of the American Muslim com-
munity and its development was our 1969 attempt to make available to the
American communityhalal(divinely permissible) meat products from
chicken, cattle, and animals in general that are slaughtered according to the
rules of Shari’aa. I tried to arrange for the famous Oscar Mayer meat com-
pany in Madison, Wisconsin to give us beef that was slaughtered according
to Islamic rites, as it is conceptually done for kosher meat.^16 I went to Oscar
Mayer’s general slaughterhouse and participated in making the slaughtering
according to Shari’aa and witnessed firsthand a rabbi doing the same for
kosher meat. In an effort to systemize this process, one can state that the
meat production involved a number of subsequent steps. These are:
1.The Preparationof the animal. It had to be clean, clear of any illness,
and able to pass the standard regulatory tests of the veterinarian.
2.The Faith-Based Actionto slaughter the animal, which differs by faith.
3.The Processing, which includes proper slaughtering and cutting and
complete drainage of the blood; the details of this process also differ by
faith.
4.The Packagingcan include the labelkosher(for Jews) orhalal(for Mus-
lims) in addition to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) label
and emblem, which are required to sell the product according to the
laws of the land as described in the universal standards set by the USDA.Our strategic group reasoned that this process, too, could be copied and
used in the development of RF financing without the need to incur huge
expenses in trying to reinvent the wheel.
256 THE ART OF ISLAMIC BANKING AND FINANCE