Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Islamic finance in France, Dow Jones Islamic Market Indexes, QIB

An article today expands on the news yesterday about France's efforts to attract Islamic finance. The new facets of the article deal with the size of France's Muslim population in a country without anything comparable to the Islamic Bank of Britain in the UK as well as the potential roadblock for Islamic finance within France's staunch official secularism.

Dow Jones reports the preliminary results in December for the several Islamic market indexes and their conventional benchmarks. Qatar Islamic Bank, quoting Standard & Poor's, says that Islamic finance could become a $4 trillion industry in the next five years. The bank also plans to expand into Europe and Asia, already being licensed to open the European Finance House in the UK. Expansion is planned into France, Germany, Singapore, Indonesia and Brunei. Both were announced in their new in-house magazine Al Masraf.

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