[Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases

[RogerBW]

I've been working on this for one of the factions in a setting of mine (a "post-reformation" Islam a few hundred years in the future).

As far as I can see, and I don't speak Arabic so I know I'm missing things, the prohibition on charging/paying interest is a very lawyerly one. For example:

I have an investment with an Islamic bank. According to all the paperwork, it does not pay interest. Instead, they will pay me a certain extra sum when the investment matures based on their profit from using the money, and anything above that extra sum they get to keep. This seems to me a frankly casuistical distinction, in much the same vein as the Kosher Light Switch.

The overall model for lending to businesses is that the lender gets a stake in the company - which is often expressed as a percentage of income. Again, there are lots of ways of shading this to make the income stream more predictable.

If an Islamic bank lends me money to buy a house, it's effectively a rent-to-own deal: I pay them rent for a set period, during which they own the house, and at the end of that period ownership transfers to me. The distinction between this and a mortgage payment is frankly microscopic. (They can even sell that rent stream + backing asset to another bank, just as a Western bank would sell a mortgage income stream.)

The other big factor in Islamic finance, which may or may not be a concern in your culture, is the prohibition on gambling. Again there are lots of ways round this, but it affects the ethos of the financial markets, which (at least nominally) are more about investment than about speculation.