A world based on social business
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Maswood Alam Khan
A banker working in any Islamic bank would tell you that they do neither charge interests on loans given to a businessman nor do they give any interest to any depositor who keeps money with them. Then how do they do business as a bank? They will answer: "We follow Shariah Law that strictly forbids interests; so we apportion our profits among the money-keepers and ask the money-takers to share with our bank their profits or losses". Wow! What an ideal society we could have been living in if our bankers instead of behaving like loan sharks would have been our business partners to share our pains and pleasures!
But, given our borrowers' culture of "not to pay loans back to the lenders" all the borrowers of Islamic banks would have made their balance sheets always showing losses; and all the Islamic banks, thanks to their utopian philosophy of banking business, would have been liquidated long time back due to their bearing mountains of losses incurred by their borrowers. But, ironically, Islamic banks in Bangladesh are doing maximum business and making the highest profits, not necessarily only for their using Islamic words but also for their aggressive business strategies with missionary zeal.
The curious paradox is smart business houses in the modern world are thriving with their verbose style of speaking in unintelligible jargons or juggling with professional words that are very difficult for commoners to understand. Islamic banks or for that matter banks with any Christian or English or Arabic names are thus doing roaring businesses only by calling the nomenclature 'interest' as 'profit' and rephrasing the names of their other products in Arabic words -- a new trick of shortchanging the gullible Muslims who have been taught to loathe banks dealing with the word 'interest'.
Last Saturday, our Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus while giving a lecture at the inaugural session of a three-day international conference on "Creating a world without poverty---social business bridging the gap" has called for establishing social business as a problem solver, not as a means to maximise profit, with a view to tackling the global poverty and social injustice. Mr. Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, also fancied "If we had created another kind of business on the basis of selflessness, we could have created a different kind of world".
I would have been more excited if Muhammad Yunus paraphrasing the banker working in an Islamic bank would have said: "How pleasant life would be if all the rich would have distributed their profits among the poor and all the poor could have passed their losses onto the rich!"
While reading what Yunus lectured in the conference I myself mused: "How pleasant life would be if people with money would have used it the way people who don't have it would use it if they had it". It is an established truth that the poor are more generous than the rich. A poor man doesn't mind sparing five percent of his earnings for the hapless; but a rich man sweats profusely while writing a check that would deplete his earnings to an extent of less than one percent on account of an expenditure that is essential for safeguarding our environment. But when it comes to delivering lectures in pompous gatherings it is always the rich who give sermons on what is good to humanity or what is essential to reduce poverty.
"Poverty is not a question of money, it is a question of structure," Yunus said in the same conference. Everybody must agree with him if only his own Grameen Bank would have restructured their so-called collateral-free lending system by selecting group members from among the poorest of the poor instead of their present way of selecting from the comparatively affluent poor and would have charged interests like those of the state-owned banks at less than 10 percent on reducing balance basis instead of their present way of charging 30 percent interest calculated on flat rate basis.
In this age of casino capitalism the pundits are always busy rephrasing their jargons to camouflage the brute mechanism of robbing the poor of their meager properties and helping the rich churn out money in the name of capitalism, corporatism, socio-capitalism, freestyle-ism -- or social business -- whenever or wherever the term suits in this world replete with hypocrisies and falsities. The world would have been a better place for our living if we all could mean what we do say.
Email: maswood@hotmail.com
A banker working in any Islamic bank would tell you that they do neither charge interests on loans given to a businessman nor do they give any interest to any depositor who keeps money with them. Then how do they do business as a bank? They will answer: "We follow Shariah Law that strictly forbids interests; so we apportion our profits among the money-keepers and ask the money-takers to share with our bank their profits or losses". Wow! What an ideal society we could have been living in if our bankers instead of behaving like loan sharks would have been our business partners to share our pains and pleasures!
But, given our borrowers' culture of "not to pay loans back to the lenders" all the borrowers of Islamic banks would have made their balance sheets always showing losses; and all the Islamic banks, thanks to their utopian philosophy of banking business, would have been liquidated long time back due to their bearing mountains of losses incurred by their borrowers. But, ironically, Islamic banks in Bangladesh are doing maximum business and making the highest profits, not necessarily only for their using Islamic words but also for their aggressive business strategies with missionary zeal.
The curious paradox is smart business houses in the modern world are thriving with their verbose style of speaking in unintelligible jargons or juggling with professional words that are very difficult for commoners to understand. Islamic banks or for that matter banks with any Christian or English or Arabic names are thus doing roaring businesses only by calling the nomenclature 'interest' as 'profit' and rephrasing the names of their other products in Arabic words -- a new trick of shortchanging the gullible Muslims who have been taught to loathe banks dealing with the word 'interest'.
Last Saturday, our Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus while giving a lecture at the inaugural session of a three-day international conference on "Creating a world without poverty---social business bridging the gap" has called for establishing social business as a problem solver, not as a means to maximise profit, with a view to tackling the global poverty and social injustice. Mr. Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, also fancied "If we had created another kind of business on the basis of selflessness, we could have created a different kind of world".
I would have been more excited if Muhammad Yunus paraphrasing the banker working in an Islamic bank would have said: "How pleasant life would be if all the rich would have distributed their profits among the poor and all the poor could have passed their losses onto the rich!"
While reading what Yunus lectured in the conference I myself mused: "How pleasant life would be if people with money would have used it the way people who don't have it would use it if they had it". It is an established truth that the poor are more generous than the rich. A poor man doesn't mind sparing five percent of his earnings for the hapless; but a rich man sweats profusely while writing a check that would deplete his earnings to an extent of less than one percent on account of an expenditure that is essential for safeguarding our environment. But when it comes to delivering lectures in pompous gatherings it is always the rich who give sermons on what is good to humanity or what is essential to reduce poverty.
"Poverty is not a question of money, it is a question of structure," Yunus said in the same conference. Everybody must agree with him if only his own Grameen Bank would have restructured their so-called collateral-free lending system by selecting group members from among the poorest of the poor instead of their present way of selecting from the comparatively affluent poor and would have charged interests like those of the state-owned banks at less than 10 percent on reducing balance basis instead of their present way of charging 30 percent interest calculated on flat rate basis.
In this age of casino capitalism the pundits are always busy rephrasing their jargons to camouflage the brute mechanism of robbing the poor of their meager properties and helping the rich churn out money in the name of capitalism, corporatism, socio-capitalism, freestyle-ism -- or social business -- whenever or wherever the term suits in this world replete with hypocrisies and falsities. The world would have been a better place for our living if we all could mean what we do say.
Email: maswood@hotmail.com