What is Ribaa?

[reepicheep]

The fatwa I quote came from here:


Financial fatwas by Dr. Monzer Kahf


but the fatwas linked to by Dan are essentially the same (the same scholar made them).


Here is another fatwa which can be found in the above fatwa session:

QUESTION: Is purchasing a house with a conventional Mortgage haram? Or is it consider basic necessities? 
ANSWER: The permissibility Fatwa is conditional on: 1) there are no alternatives that are acceptable to Shari`ah; 2) there is a need for house purchase on the basis of family size, schooling, public services, security, tax deduction, etc.

Here in Canada, there are 600,000 muslims and only one Islamic bank. Since the bank can't possibly supply mortgages to all Canadian muslims, muslims have no choice but to go to a regular bank if they need a loan. Besides, the cost of borrowing money from a regular bank is less than the cost of borrowing money from an Islamic bank. Why should Muslims be forced to pay more than non-Muslims for loans???


Here's an interesting statistic about Islamic banking. World wide, Islamic banking has assets under management of approximately 200 billion dollars. Canada alone has 5 banks which each exceed this amount. And Canada's banks are tiny compared to the banks in other countries of the world.