[Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

I'm by no means an expert or even particularly comfortable with Sharia banking, but it may be helpful to break out what Al Rayan Bank says is happening with its home financing.

While this is technically, in terms of the rules of this interpretation of sharia, a set of contracts that does not involve interest, it seems in actual fact to be an interest-bearing loan, in which the amount that is paid back exceeds the amount that is borrowed. And so it enables the normal sort of financial arrangements that a Finance roll might allow, but with an extra roll, perhaps, to address the legal technicalities.

The actual situation of "no interest can be charged" would be one where you went to a bank to borrow money, and they could not have you pay back more than the amount you borrowed. And then no bank would lend you money in the first place. You could borrow from a relative, perhaps, but there wouldn't be a commercial loan market.

And if that were truly the case, there would be other effects. For example, if you had gold, or federal reserve notes, you would have no reason to lend them. You could bury them in the back yard, like the servant in the parable of the talents, or stuff your mattress with them, or put them in a secure warehouse and pay a regular fee for storage. Or you could buy durable goods like works of art. But there wouldn't be what we call "capitalism."

(The late nineteenth century individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker envisioned something like this. Among other things, he wanted to do away with rent, by having no protection for ownership of land that a person was not actually occupying and using.)