Comment by lrs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrs | Hacker News Reader

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I remember having this same thought when I learned about the existence of "Islamic finance." Apparently, Islam has a strong doctrinal prohibition against charging interest, and there's an entire thriving sector of Islamic law and business dedicated to structuring transactions in ways that don't technically charge interest but still yield a return on principal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking

This reminds me of a little kid beating up his classmates on the playground being told by the playground monitor to stop touching them, and then turning around going back to tormenting them by starting to punch them and stopping just short of making actual contact, and saying "neener neener, I'm not actually touching you." Except here, instead of a playground monitor, it's...an omnipotent creator deity.

My understanding is that a generous portion of Rabbinic legal theory is about tapdancing around the Mosaic law.

Because most observant jews would not, I can only assume, want their children to be stoned to death for giving them a bit of cheek. Or have to be beaten up because they shaved. And so on.

What strikes me odd about biblical law is how little of it is devoted to elucidating the big questions. Such as: what about the corner cases to the Ten Commandments? Is killing in a war forbidden? What about self-defence? And so on.

Islamic finance is a fairly complicated subject. As someone who has no background in finance, I have been trying to understand some basics.

But overall, what I understand is that for a bank to give out loans, they must also provide every opportunity to help those who are borrowing money. For example, they can extend the payment, provide advice etc

The main thing about Islamic finance is that it is all asset based. You can take a loan to buy a car, but you can't take a loan to renovate a house etc. This is to stop people from borrowing when they can't possibly pay back. There are few models for unsecured loans. But, as I said, its very complicated.

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