“God Almighty has left us with a riddle – why are both the highest grossing GDP countries and the lowest grossing GDP countries Muslim?” So mused one of the speakers at the Islamic Trade and Finance 2008 conference in London last week. No-one answered the question. With addresses from three MPs, letters from both opposition leaders, and support from Gordon Brown, the trade conference was more about business opportunities for UK politicians rather than unravelling conundrums. In the rush for liquidity from the Middle East, the Government seems ever keen to grease hands with the bankers of oil money.
For long treated as oddities of the financial community, Islamic financiers now feel vindicated. They were giddy from the attention and almost exuberant with the current plight of the West. The head of the Malaysian sovereign wealth investment wing compared his country’s recovery from their 97/98 heart-attack with the current turmoil. He had to hold himself in check: “…I am not gloating,” he added, almost as an afterthought. It took Shaukat Aziz, the renowned banker and former Prime Minister of Pakistan to inject a more sober tone to the proceedings. The Islamic world was just as likely to be affected by the global credit crunch, he argued in a thoughtful and eloquent keynote address. Yet one could not help feeling perplexed by his intellectual somersaults. Was not this the same man who, instead of tax reform in a country where 1% of the population pay tax, took the artificial measures of privatisation, liberalisation and credit-ease? What right did he have now to castigate the IMF for a lack of leadership – given that their ideology had once been his? One remained equally puzzled by Jack Straw’s sarcastic barb directed at city bankers. As one of the key Labour frontbenchers, and perhaps the keenest legislating mind in Parliament, was not it his job to have protected us by having regulated the markets at the time?
Most interesting of all was the activist strand that the World’s non-conventional sector found itself uniting around. Anne Pettifor of Advocacy International, returning from Hungary, where meltdown threatens to ruin the country, railed against the reforms three decades earlier. The Credit Controls passed by the UK in 1971 were lambasted by her as “all credit and no control.” She was equally scathing of Nixon’s unilateral pullout from pegging the greenback to gold. Had she found a resonant audience with the Muslims? For sure, the audience lapped up her criticisms of the Occident. But I remain not a little sceptical of their sincerity to lasting reform. Remember the riddle we started with? Where there should have been answers, the silence was deafening.
