It’s a maximalist position that the Federal Shariat Court has taken. They’ve specified the 31st of December, 2027 as the deadline for the complete elimination of interest in the banking system.
The central bank has, unsurprisingly, moved the Supreme Court against this decision.
The justices at the Shariat court may well argue that theirs isn’t, in fact, a maximalist position and that their deadline would have been an 80-year wait since the foundation of the republic. A fruition of what was promised; a logical continuation of Pakistan ka matlab kya…
Alas, we live in the real world. Modern banking cannot possibly survive without interest and neither have the ulema nor religious-minded professionals from the world of finance come up with a system that can plausibly compete with the current system.
Islamic Banking is an area, yes, but many argue that it is interest-free in name only. The story of Islamic banking has an interesting and meandering history in our country. Needless to say, in private, even some of the muftis employed by the banks admit that the system is anything but interest-free. Some ulema are public about it. But even if Islamic banking did truly qualify what the clergy demand, the rest of the world, even most from rest of the Muslim world, won’t be willing to play ball and would want to trade with us and our banks and financial institutions through conventional routes.
Religious beliefs are important to most of Pakistanis and we do take such matters seriously. But it would not be unfair to assume that we are also practical and worldly about these issues. That we need to look before we leap into uncharted territory in such critical spheres.
