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Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of more ethical banks, but I think the article is overselling the popularity of Islamic institutions in the UK. I live in London and whilst I'm aware that Sharia banking exists as a concept, I've never heard of BLME. Also the opening sentence comes off as slightly absurd:

>THE HALAL restaurants established by Muslim migrants in Britain quickly inspired an almost religious following among non-believers.

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>THE HALAL restaurants established by Muslim migrants in Britain quickly inspired an almost religious following among non-believers.

I think some people (not massive numbers, admittedly) avoid Halal restaurants/meat because the method of slaughter is less humane and doesn't typically involve stunning the animal first.

From my understanding, stunning is still done in the West for producing halal meat- you just have to be careful not to kill the animal, so usually lower-level shocks are used.

It looks like it varies between low voltage stunning and no stunning at all: http://www.theweek.co.uk/58447/halal-meat-what-does-it-invol...

Mind you, kosher slaughter is no better.

So-called 'sharia finance' isn't more ethical, not that there anything unethical with charging interests.

What they do is a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid calling what you pay for a loan 'interest'.

That's the argument of Tarek El Diwany. From the second last paragraph of the article:

Some purists dislike the way modern sharia finance is run. Tarek El Diwany, a consultant, says banks are devising loopholes to sell nominally sharia-compliant products that are essentially the same as any other. For 1,400 years Islamic finance has been based on mutual ownership and profit-sharing, he says. But most sharia deposits return a specified rate similar to interest, not a share of actual profits earned. He describes it as “blank-faced copy-catting”.

"banks are devising loopholes"

But Tarek El Diwany repeats himself.

There could be some real differences between conventional and Sharia-based lending, but, no sarcasm, banks are great at moving around risks in ways non-finance people can hardly imagine and it would be a trivial exercise for them to move the chips around to make the Sharia stuff merely appear to be Sharia while still being conventional, using the mass of conventional investments as raw material, in a way that also is set up so it works 99% of the time but will in some manner catastrophically fail in a Black Swan [1] event because of the games they played with moving risks around until even their own computers don't really understand it anymore.

[1]: Though as Taleb says, is it really a "Black Swan" when it was really quite predictable all along, if you just reject their statistical framework and use something with more realistic fat tails?

It’s definitely possible, but the sharia bank would also have a contractual obligation to share in the loss. For something like a mortgage on a home, the title would belong to the sharia bank until the loan was paid off. Banking becomes extremely conservative in state of affairs.

In theory, strict rules like these should be extremely hard to game; in practice, banks and other financial institutions are a little too creative.

Seems like they need to have some inspector-scholars verify that there are no haram banking practices going on.

From my perspective, a "sharia bank" is an oxymoron. Muslims should be exclusively patronizing "sharia credit unions". Professional bankers are too clever by far to be obeying the spirit of the Muslim business laws. If there were doing it correctly, they would have zero non-Muslim customers, because sharia banking is fundamentally uncompetitive with non-Muslim banking in such a way that even academic macro-economists can prove it.

do you have recommendations for reading up on this?

Not really. I did some searching on Tarek El Diwany and I found these two things:

http://www.kreatoczest.com/kz_publishing_ourtitles-pwi.htm

http://www.kreatoczest.com/kz_publishing_ourtitles-wawaid.ht...

The poster is probably referring to their avoidance of sin investments like arms and tobacco.

Yeah, some actual growth numbers and customer numbers would have been nice, but I don't see The Economist overselling the popularity at all; instead, I just see them saying that it is growing (based on my reading of the first paragraph).

Edit: fix typo

I agree, actual figures would help a lot. The cynic in me suspects their absence is because they don't support the hypothesis.

The claim that halal restaurants have an "almost religious following" among non-Muslims raises my eyebrows almost as much as the claims that e.g. there are "no-go areas" in Muslim parts of Birmingham.

I've lived in various parts of the UK all my life, I've been involved in Muslim communities and I've been to a lot of restaurants, both halal and otherwise. Basically the only reason a restaurant will advertise its halal status is to indicate this fact to Muslims. It might be the case that e.g. Lebanese or Indian cuisine is popular among non-Muslim Brits, but that's because of the taste of the food. If anything, there are ethical concerns about halal meat in my peer groups due to the controversies over stunning, and undercover videos showing cruelty in some halal slaughterhouses.

Honestly, the first paragraph reads to me like a string of inflated claims that's been shivved in there to exaggerate the significance of the article's content.

> It might be the case that e.g. Lebanese or Indian cuisine is popular among non-Muslim Brits

Umm.. Majority of indians are hindus not muslims.

I think the point was that it's "ethnic food from somewhere in southern Asia that's further west than Myanmar or so" not that it conforms to any particular religious requirement.

It's not even that! It's only that so-called "Indian" restaurants in the UK are halal more often than average. From my understanding most dishes you get in those restaurants in the UK are different to what you would actually get served anywhere in south-east Asia.

Oh! Your comment reminded me of something my dad told me (my country of origin is Bangladesh): https://www.quora.com/Why-are-almost-all-Indian-restaurants-... .

I wouldn’t say that that’s the only reason either. Even if a non-Muslim Indian does set up an Indian restaurant, they have a high chance of attracting recurring customers that happen to be Muslims that observe a keeping a halal diet.

My experience is limited, but in America I've seen a few Muslim run restaurants use the word halal in their name, and have heard the term being used similarly to "Chinese food." The author may come from where that happens, and is referring to things like Pakistani cuisine.

To add some data, in San Francisco, you can find “The Halal Guys” (https://thehalalguys.com) and “Halal Wings Plus” (http://halalwingsplus.com).

Here in UK, I'm a fan of halal chippies as they always use vegetable oil instead of beef dripping for their chips and patties.

I'm always sad when I see signs with "No Lard No Pork No MSG" it's like all the good stuff taken away.

I just sang that to the tune of "Only Fools and Horses".

Interesting. Why? Halal definitely allows beef to be combined with potatoes.

The beef has to be halal beef. In this context of using beef fat as an additive to other food, the beef fat has to be halal as well.

right, but the the gp said halal establishments always used vegetable oil instead of beef fat.

I can think of another reason too: these chippie vendors might also want to cater to other people who don’t want to eat beef e.g. some Hindus. Some halal Indian restaurants in San Francisco do something similar: they serve halal chicken and lamb, but no beef.

tl;dr Vegetable oil ticks boxes for multiple sets of clientele.

That makes a good deal of sense. I'm a vegetarian, I appreciate it, but was merely surprised given that halal beef and halal beef fat exist. Thanks for these further speculations.

Perhaps there just isn't enough of a market for halal beef fat to make it worth the while of the carcass processing plants. They might sell it to be mixed with other beef fat.

This muslim chippy owner just told me that halal chippies never use beef dripping, when I asked about what oil they were using.

But as you say, it may not be because beef dripping as such is haram, but rather that the beef dripping that is available and used at traditional English chippies is not.

Honestly, I don't know why. I still look out for the halal sign on chippies, but I've also become better at telling just by the smell.

That's not a reason to be a fan. It's much unhealthier. Unless they are changing out the vegetable oil every day then it carries a much bigger cancer risk (due to aldehydes).

It is a reason to be fan if you are concerned about animal rights and the environmental impact of animal husbandry.

But, yes, in terms of personal health vegetable oil might not be better in any way. I know very little about that, and I have no reason to doubt your claim.

Are patties vegetarian? It's not like we're killing cattle specifically to render tallow.

Depends where in the UK you are. I guess fish patties prevalent, but in East Yorkshire potato patties with sage are also common. They're really delicious!

You're probably right that cows are not killed mainly for their tallow. Yet, let me try to illustrate why this can be off putting anyway (not trying to flame troll, but just to politely answer your comment): If your cat (or dog, or horse, etc) died in a traffic accident, would you cook a meal from it, even if it was not killed for that purpose? Some people respect the rights of all animals to the degree that they refuse to consider them as food; just like we do with our animal pets and other humans (even the humans we don't like, if any).

I don't see anything more or less ethical here. The bank has to get a return. Whether it does so through interest or a "share of the profit" is more a matter of risk and transaction cost. It's hard for me to believe that what it costs to maintain a knowledge of a borrower's profit and then collect from that is really competitive.

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