Sharia Finance Industry a Symptom of Britain’s Expanding Islamist Ecosystem

Incendiary advertisements on London transport for a New York-based sharia finance start-up urging travelers to “join the money revolution!” indicate the growing importance of Islamist financial industries and ideas to the establishment of a single system of radical religious, cultural, political and economic control.

The advance of Islamism in politics is the most publicly visible indication of this problem, keenly felt at the last U.K. general election, in which five independent Islamist and fellow traveler MPs were elected to parliament in July 2024, with another ten to fifteen Labour safe seats reduced to razor-thin margins. The political upset followed election campaigns marred by the demonization and harassment of opponents, and allegations of religious pressure put on constituents to vote for them. The five pro-Gaza independent MPs were elected with the help of The Muslim Vote, a campaign group backed by 22 Muslim-founded entities, including a number of hardline Islamist organizations.

Sharia finance-backed Islamists in British politics: “The biggest political revolution in 50 years just happened.”

The five independent MPs have since formed a faction in the parliament called The Independent Alliance. The Muslim Vote (TMV) campaign trumpeted this development on X, stating: “The biggest political revolution in 50 years just happened—and most people don’t know. Some called it destructive and divisive. Others call it a New Hope for our country.”

Counter-Islamist analysts have now drawn attention to TMV’s links to the sharia finance industry. Indeed, TMV and its affiliates advocate an interconnected Western Islamist ecosystem, noting that “unity and coordination are at the heart of what we are about.”

Wahed Inc, the New York based sharia finance start-up responsible for the controversial adverts in London, employs, as its Global Head of Risk and Shariah, Umar Suleman, who runs a “sharia scholars programme” at a non-profit called The Islamic Finance Council UK (UKIFC) and advises a number of other Islamic financial technology start-ups. Suleman is also a publicly-listed supporter of TMV, discussing the campaign in interviews at Islam21C, a notoriously extreme Islamist publication at which he is finance editor.

Meanwhile, Suleman’s other employer, UKIFC, serves as the secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamic and Ethical Finance, administered from the office of controversial Bradford West Labour MP Naz Shah. The group “holds regular meetings with stakeholders, engages with Government...and seeks to reinforce the UK’s position as the Western hub for Islamic finance.”

Suleman is also co-founder of National Waqf Fund, a charity dedicated to “Islamic endowment management,” and which is a charitable partner of another TMV supporting organization, Deen Developers.

National Waqf states on its website that it “generates sustainable charity revenue through strategic investments,” while Deen Developers, a “tech-for-good community of founders, techies and creatives” explains on its website that National Waqf Fund is “seeking to revolutionise how monetary charity could operate for many generations to come.”

Wahed’s links to Islamists with parliamentary influence are extensive. The sharia finance firm employs, as its global advisor, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, a prominent British Islamist figure and co-founder of Muslim Engagement and Development, formerly known as iENGAGE, a lobbying group ejected from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia in 2011 after it opposed government efforts to ban foreign Islamist hate preachers banned from entering the UK.

Until September Wahed also employed Sadiq Dorasat as its U.K. product manager, who also happens to be the CEO and co-founder of Muslim Census, dissolved in 2022 but listed a backer of TMV in 2024. Dorasat’s organization sought to provide data for “actionable insights” on issues affecting the Muslim population in the U.K, with a particular focus on finance.

Prominent extremists dominate this new industry. Indeed, sharia finance ideas have helped to unite disparate Islamists, who otherwise, politically and religiously, often struggle to collaborate.

Sharia finance start-up, Islamic Finance Guru, “a halal investment and personal finance community,” is among the leading supporters of the Muslim Vote campaign. At TMV’s May 2024 launch in Birmingham, Islamic Finance Guru co-founder Mohammed Ibrahim Khan spoke alongside: Sufyan Ismail, founding chief executive of lobbying group MEND (Muslim Engagement and Development); Anas Tikriti, a director of the Muslim Association of Britain (named as “the British affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood” in parliament in March 2024); and Muhammad Jalal, (also known as Jalaluddin Patel), a former leader of revolutionary Salafi Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Hizb ut-Tahrir was banned in January 2024 as “an antisemitic organisation that actively promotes and encourages terrorism, including praising and celebrating the appalling 7 October attacks,” while both MEND and MAB were then being considered to be labeled by the British government as “extremist” organizations.

Islamic Finance Guru’s Khan is a visiting imam at the British Muslim Heritage Centre in Manchester, whose chief executive was forced to step down from a publicly funded role in the NHS last year after posting a stream of anti-Semitic comments on his social media, including calling Israelis “Zionazis.”

In a promotional video for IFG, Khan, an Oxford University Politics Philosophy and Economics graduate, says, “Our mission is to help Muslims get wealthier globally and put their money to work. By creating a wealthier community, we can address education outcomes, health outcomes, under representation in media and politics, overrepresentation in prisons...”

Khan and IFG co-founder Mohsin Patel are also co-founders and directors of Cur8 Capital, Islamic Finance Guru’s investment platform, incorporated in January 2023, which claims that its fund managers “collectively manage US$20bn+.”

According to an analysis of the Muslim Vote campaign by Carys Moseley, public policy researcher at Christian Concern, Islamic Finance Guru was behind TMV’s demand (one of 20) that the UK government invest 7% of public pensions in “ethical and Islamic funds.” Other TMV demands included “Deliver alternative student finance” and “Ensure sharia compliant pensions are available at every workplace. So the 1/3 of Muslims without a pension get one.”

The Islamist-linked Islamic Finance Guru was behind the Muslim Vote’s demand that the UK government invest 7% of public pensions in “ethical and Islamic funds.”

(There are just under 4 million Muslims in the UK according to the 2021 Census, which accounts for 6.0% of the total population, although 2017 projections from the Pew Research Foundation suggest that based on median migration levels, this could rise to 16.7% by 2050.)

A May 2018 booklet,What’s Wrong with Islamic Finance? published by Christian Concern, warns that sharia finance is a component of Islamist separatism and the product of a purposeful Islamist cultivation of a powerfully distinct group identity among diaspora Muslims. Its author Tim Dieppe, head of public policy at Christian Concern, told FWI: “The idea that interest is forbidden is a modern radical interpretation. Most Muslims throughout the history of Islam and still today are very happy to use interest. They feel the Qur’an is prohibiting usury or extortionate interest, much as Christians view the same with the Bible. It is radical Muslims who have reinterpreted it to be a complete ban on interest in order to create an alternative financial system.”

Around the world, Islamist leaders today continue to stress the importance of sharia finance. Dr Mahathir Mohamed, the former Malaysian leader and a prominent anti-Semite, has declared: “A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West].”

The modern drive for the establishment of an interest-free Islamic economic system was mostly loudly championed by Abul A’la Maududi, founder of the militant Pakistani Islamist Jama’at-i Islami movement. Christian Concern explains that Maududi proposed replacing interest-based finance with “direct equity investment,” otherwise known as profit and loss sharing, a form of equity financing.

The U.K. now accounts for 85% of Islamic finance assets in Europe and was the first non-Muslim country in the world to issue a sharia bond (sukuk) for £200m in 2014, and another for £500m in 2021. In 2021, the Bank of England even launched an Alternative Liquidity Facility, to allow all banks to hold assets “in a non-interest-based environment.”

Christian Concern questions the whole basis of such arrangements, citing examples uncovered in the report Interest and the Paradox of Contemporary Islamic Law and Finance, from Fordham International Law Journal (2003), which finds “the bulk of Islamic financial practices formally base rates of return or costs of capital on a benchmark interest rate such as LIBOR, and would easily be classified by any MBA student as interest-based debt finance.”

“Muslims themselves have criticized sharia finance as being deceptive, because it is basically interest in disguise, “ states Tim Dieppe, head of public policy at Christian Concern, who cites in the booklet Muhammad Saleem, author of Islamic Banking - a $300 Billion Deception (2006). “So, it’s extraordinary that Western governments and major institutions have bought into this without properly scrutiny.”

Dieppe’s concerns are borne out by Islamic Finance Guru co-founder Ibrahim Khan’s fawning February 2023 podcast interview with hardline pro-Caliphate cleric of Palestinian origin, Haitham Al-Haddad. Haddad, a colleague of TMV’s Umer Suleman, was once called “one of the most dangerous men in Britain” and listed on a “national sanction list” of preachers banned from entering Denmark “in consideration of the public order” from January 2021 to March 2024.

In the podcast, IFG’s Khan introduces Al-Haddad as “one of the Sheikhs that we look to… if they say it’s OK, we’ll follow them.” Al-Haddad urges British Muslims not to move to Muslim countries, but to stay in Britain, “let us work for the future and develop ourselves.” “We need to get politically very developed, then?” asks Khan. Al-Haddad replies “Yes, I have a vision for this.”

Haitham Al-Haddad’s vision for the British Muslim polity can be surmised from a 2018 profile in The Times, in which he says of the wearing of the full face veil in Britain: “When they tell you it’s a barrier to integration, you should say: ‘Yes, it is against integration. So what? I don’t want to integrate with you.’” Haddad added: “Europe is in a dynamic state. We are in a minority for now. Later we might be a majority. We want peaceful co-existence but don’t expect us to live by the same values. European governments should not treat Muslims as visitors who have to comply with rules defined by non-Muslims. We are European Muslims. We are partners in Europe. Britain is my country. They should not expect me to assimilate.”

In a September 2020 podcast discussion between Sheikh Haitham Al-Haddad and Dilly Hussain, deputy editor of the popular Islamist news website 5 Pillars, Hussain asks Al-Haddad: “How can we re-establish the khilafah (caliphate) again?” Al-Haddad answers “Because of sensitivity we will not mention certain groups. So will we do dawah [proselytize]. And we will seek Nusra [support] from maybe the military elite. So, you are working with the system. And also, you have put your people in the military. When those people in the military have accepted your dawah and they become part of you. You have to work within the system to overthrow the system, to change the system.”

Christian Concern warns that “Sharia law is in fact inherently discriminatory in relation to both women and non-Muslims. Sharia finance does not directly discriminate in this way, but lends credibility to a system which does. We should be wary of anything which supports the wider influence of sharia law in our culture.”