Monday, January 14, 2008

Faith-based investing grows

The Financial Times, in a front page article, report that the highest-performing religiously-based fund was the Christian Timothy Fund, which reported growth of 17 per cent during the previous year and has averaged 18.6 per cent per year for the previous five years. Shari'ah-compliant fund manager Amana Mutual Funds Trust saw its Income fund come in second with growth of 14.1 per cent for the previous year.

The blog at Christianity Today remarks on recent news that AAOIFI Shari'ah board chairman Sheikh Taqi Usmani believes up to 85 percent of ijara sukuk, those with repurchase agreements, may be Shari'ah-non-compliant. The conclusion of the post by Rob Moll is that "Christians should pay attention to this debate. While the church has long since become comfortable with loaning money with interest, it can be helpful to see another religious group wrestle with modern capitalism. After all, why was it that for centuries Christians forbade usury and then heavily regulated it? Hmm, maybe the mess created by the sub-prime mortgage lenders has something to do with it."

1 comment:

Petra said...

I think this is VERY interesting :)