News

A dedicated group of intelligence consultants are sounding the alarm over the growth of Islamic banking and its potential nexus to radical Islamic and terrorist causes, even as many in the banking industry dismiss their concerns as overstated. Islamic banking, a relatively new concept internationally with the first Sharia compliant institutions developing in the late 1960s, has spread exponentially across the globe and includes several institutions in the U.S. Sharia-compliant assets of the top 500 Islamic banks grew 27.6 percent from November 2007 to $639.1 billion, according to a November 2008 article in U.K.-based The Banker. And, increasingly, many large...