Over at Yanabi.com, an online Islamic forum, a participant named “Waxing Crescent” recently started a thread entitled, “Jizya – is it a means tested poll tax?”.
The correct answer (which was artfully dodged by all those who responded to Waxing Crescent’s question on the message board) is that nothing in the Koran or Hadith exempts impoverished non-Muslims from paying the jizya.
Somebody named “Faraz Hasan” answered the question by quickly changing the subject to state that Muslims pay more in zakat than non-Muslims pay in jizya. This is not necessarily true and it is misleading. Read the rest of this entry ?
Tut, tut, Turkmen
February 26, 2010In addition to blacklisting Iran last week as a significant source of money laundering and terrorist financing, the Financial Action Task Force has declared that Turkmenistan has failed to address long-standing AML/CFT deficiencies. FATF tried their hardest to sound polite in their public statement:
This seems to be the latest in a series of black marks for the small, Central Asian state. Money Jihad readers may remember that Turkmenistan was recently ranked 171 out of 179 countries in terms of economic freedom. That put Turkmenistan in the “repressed” category just a couple notches below Iran.
The State Department’s annual report of religious freedom for 2009 noted several additional problems. They found that in Turkmenistan (which is majority-Sunni Muslim with a large Russian Orthodox Christian minority), “Mosques and Muslim clergy are state-sponsored and financed. The Russian Orthodox Church and other religious groups are independently financed.” The report also that Turkmenistan funded air fare for the hajj by some of their Muslim citizens.
Posted in News commentary | Tagged economic freedom, FATF, money laundering, religious freedom, Turkmenistan | 11 Comments »