Mere Proper Staffing won't Do

Mansoor Durrani has called seniors in the field as Uncles of Islamic banking. I consider him to be at least a Cousin of the profession! He has highlighted some basic fallacies of the Islamic finance as practised today but the conclusion he has drawn and the remedy he has suggested are not matching with his sharp comments. He has rightly opined that these so-called ‘Islamic funds’ are still investing in capital markets ruled by heavy speculators and the Institutional investors’ are doing nothing more than parking their funds in ‘safe bets’ (real estate sector) without any economic value addition! The reason behind these fallacies is not that “founders and subsequent sponsors of these Islamic institutions faced the question of staffing; they had to turn to Wall Streets and Dalal Streets.” The issue is not so simple. My comment is that the “founders and subsequent sponsors” lost their breath midway and proceeded on a quite different path from the one they were originally treading. At times it looks like that the word ‘Islam’ in the Islamic finance and Islamic banking is a misnomer. So the basic cause of the malaise is the structural deficiency that has crept in. Mere proper staffing will not lead anywhere.