Right time to promote Islamic banking

?No one is saying we are glad the financial crisis has happened but now all banks are being forced to reassess what they do. That is not to say that our solution, the Islamic banking, was not right before. It was always right but sometimes opportunities like this make it easier for people to be more receptive,? Azhar Khan, head of finance at the European Finance House, told Arab News during the Saudi International Conference that concluded this week. The common criticism of Islamic banking is that it is not really Shariah compliant. Islamic banking was developed 20 to 30 years ago. The approach was to try and replicate products that were already there in the market. ?We do not have to keep replicating. We have a wider solution that we should now be telling the world about. We need not be afraid to go forward with some of the advanced and further developed methodology with Islamic finance,? he said. According to him, Islamic banking has more openness. There is a fairer sharing of risk and reward and that there is more ethical investment. Ethical investment and ethical products are important to non-Muslims and ?talking as a Muslim, we know that there is wisdom in Islamic products and it is for us to go out and explain this to people,? Khan said. Things have changed recently and global banks, whether conventional and Islamic, had a wake up call about the need to reassess. ?If there is no demand for the things that we want to move toward, then it becomes very difficult. We are there to serve our community and provide products for our clients. But it is also important that our market, our customers want to move with us as well and then we can move everything forward?; Kazinform cites the Arab News. See www.arabnews.com for full version