Reader seeks bank to fund charity

Sir, my “charity” is doing okay, but I really need bank sponsorship to take it to the next level. Please help!

One nice thing about WordPress is that it gives the administrator statistics on blog views, link referrals, clicks, etc. It also shows what words or terms people used on search engines to find your blog.

Usually, the terms people use to find Money Jihad are logical and predictable such as “hawala,” “money jihad,” “jihad tax,” “zakat foundation,” and “money laundering.”

Sometimes, the terms used are less expected and reveal the surprising and varied interests of the world’s billion web users.

An old one was “do blood donations count as zakat.” Then there’s the popular Philippines “milf” search that no doubt leads disappointed web users to our “Moro Islamic Liberation Front” tax post.  The other day we got, “i need one million dirhams.”

But the one search term used to find this blog that caught our attention the most last week was “how to ask banks to support your charity.” Run that by me again?

If I were running an Islamic charity that funnels money to Hamas, Lashkar-e Taiba, a Union of Good charity, or a Muslim World League affiliate, I too would wonder how to get a bank, in particular an Islamic bank or a conventional Western bank with a sharia finance department, to support my charity. I would actively seek out the well-known Islamist zealots that populate the sharia advisory boards of those banks. Under the radar I would tell those sharia advisors about the great work my “charity” is doing in the cause of Allah (jihad) in accordance with the Koran.

The sharia advisors are held virtually unaccountable for their nefarious decisions to divert corporate zakat to jihadist causes. See here for a case where Bangladeshi authorities actually tried doing something about the problem.

Unfortunately, enforcement against these practices is normally light at best. Rather than spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars on the red tape jungle of suspicious transaction reports filed by banks, perhaps banks should simply be required to tell regulators which Islamic charities have sought donations from them.

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