Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the has released a report entitled “Islamic Finance or Financing Islamism?” which is sharply critical of the concept of Sharia finance and Islamic banking, concepts in which the global Muslim Brotherhood has played a critical role in developing. According to a summary of the CSP report, the central aim of Sharia finance is to promote Islamist goals:
Even a perfunctory look at the history of Sharia finance reveals its highly political, Islamist nature. Neither Islamic economics nor its offshoot Islamic finance existed even as concepts until invented in the middle of the 20th century by the two patron saints of radical political Islam, Abul Ala Mawdudi of Pakistan and Sayyid Qutb of Egypt. And it took decades after that before the first Islamic banks appeared in the Middle East in the mid-1970s, yet another testimony to its fabricated nature. In strictly financial terms, Sharia finance was essentially a bogus concept from its inception, since it is virtually impossible to transact financial operations in the absence of interest and at least some speculation and uncertainty. Thus, Islamic finance is little more than a series of elaborate ploys and ruses designed to disguise the fact that it engages in both. This is not surprising, since there can no more exist Islamic finance than Christian physics or Buddhist biology. There is nothing bogus about the objectives of Sharia finance, however. It has steadfastly pursued two main goals: aiding and abetting Islamic extremism and terrorism and legitimizing Sharia as an instrument of promoting radical Islamist ideology.
As the report notes, many of the most important individuals involved with promoting Islamic finance are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, most notably global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi and North American Muslim Brotherhood leader Taha Jabir Al- Alwani.