Talk about Islamic Banking

Several days a go, I’ve meet a new acquaintances from Swedish and they’d ask me this intersting question.

What is Islamic Banking? And how you can get profit from savings without interest? Well, I hardly explain it to them because one, It is deficult –for me- to make a simple explaination about it. Two, because my English isn’t that well. And now I want to try   reexplain it. Here. Because I hope if someday I get a question like these, I can give a good answer, atleast.

Well, Islamic Banking is an Banking system wich is hold on tighly in Islam’s Rule. Or we call it as syariah.

We are ok with the interest. We doing business to find some interest, aren’t we? But what we try to eliminated is the usury. Interpreted in the Quran and the Bible, Usury is any interest charged on loans. Unfortunately, as opposed to the modern definition of usury is the charging of unreasonable or reletavely high rate of interest. Then, in this banking system we replace the usury with Profit-Sharing and Loss-Bearing. For example, if you on loan from bank, let say 10million rupiahs, for business, you have a responsible to get back that all 10million rupiahs plus a profit that you get. The percentence of profit that to divede is dealed before in the begining of contract. But, if you have no profit to divide up, or, let say if you’ve got collapse or pailit, you just have to get back the 10million rupiahs. There is no interest. Ofcourse there are some administration earn. But it’s just appropriate.

In Islamic Banking System, we just allowed the Halal Investation. There are several things that we should do or we shouldn’t. Theese all are depand on Al-Qur’an and Hadist as our compass. You know? Guided.

And they also ask if will we get a profit from our saving? And yes, you will if you let the bank invest your saving. You can choose what deal you want. Or, we call it akad. It’s kind of deal. And in Islamic Banking System we have a several kind of deal. Like I said before. You can choose that you would let the bank invest your money or you wouldn’t. And if you choose to let bank invest your money, you still can choose beetwen Unrestricted Investment Account or the Restricted Investment Account. After this all, I can say that Islamic Banking System is to esteem a transparancy and social principle. Why? Because money or profit is not the one and only think that we looking for. Our mission is to spread the distribution justice and  a prosperous to peoples.