Dinah Lord

Sharia finance: It ain't all that.

Remember Aston Martin's much ballyhooed Sharia compliant LBO back in April 2007?

Crash and burn!  And guess who's getting screwed?  The creditors.  (The next time someone tells you that Sharia finance is safer and more ethical?  Laugh in their face.)

Default by Aston Martin owner tests Islamic finance.

Kuwait’s Investment Dar, the Islamic finance holding company which owns a majority stake in British luxury carmaker Aston Martin, has suspended payments on its KD1bn ($3.5bn) debt. Its strategy of relying on short-term financing was crippled by the credit crunch. Sharia law provides no precedent for what happens next.

Islamic finance is a recent phenomenon. The aim was to create products that work exactly like Western debt instruments, but without actually making “interest payments”, which is prohibited under some interpretations of sharia law. So, broadly speaking, the lender is called an investor and interest payments are renamed profits. The new terminology hasn’t had any practical effect up to now, as there haven’t been any major Islamic finance defaults.

Kuwait: He man woman haters club strikes again, gets let off with a warning.

Remember this incident about the two women attacked in Kuwait because they were not wearing hijab?  Kuwait's Illegal Morality Police.

We have an update and it's so typical of the problem it's depressing.

From the Arab Times:

Police have reportedly arrested an unidentified youth in connection with the attack on a student of the Hawalli Business Institute. He had reportedly attacked the victim with a cane and escaped in a Jeep just because she did not wear hijab — the Muslim head cover, reports Al-Qabas daily. During interrogation the youth is said to have denied the allegation that he committed the act due to religious reasons.

No legal action has been taken against the perpetrator because the complainant has reportedly dropped the charges and the youth has taken an undertaking that he will not repeat the offence.

Kuwait's illegal morality police.

From Kuwait News - who hopes the attack was just 'a bad joke by bored teens.'   Don't count on it, fools.

Two female students were attacked by two youths this past week in Hawally, reportedly for not wearing the hijab. The girls were standing outside their school when two bearded young men jumped from an SUV, whacked them with a stick and then jumped back into their truck and took off. The incident sparked outrage and triggered discussions across Kuwait about the self-proclaimed morality police encouraged by a radical Islamist cleric Mubarak Al-Bathali.

In late December, Al-Bathali announced that he had established a voluntary committee for the "Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice" along the lines of the dreaded Saudi mutaween. The mutaween are a sort of religious police that patrol the streets in the villages and cities of Saudi Arabia, ensuring that women are covered from head to toe, that men go to the mosque to pray and that unmarried men and women do not mix in public. They also enforce other important moral strictures, like no mixed danci
ng or playing rock and roll music.

Al-Bathali said that his 'vice' squad will patrol the Sulaibikhat area first and then slowly spread out to other areas. It's not clear who was behind the attacks in Hawally. Some have argued that it might have been just a couple of youths having fun and playing a trick on the girls by whacking them like the mutaween in Saudi do.

Let's hope it was a bad joke by bored teens. God help us if random groups of men suddenly start forming 'morality' patrols and beating women on the streets of Kuwait. A Kuwaiti mutaween would create a host of problems...