Work, Religion, Money, Psychics and Other Assorted Things

Murabaha; riba; gharar; arbun; wakil; sukuk; fiqh; salam; hadith; haram; musharaka. My new vocabulary.

Caught a plane on Tuesday night to Kuala Lumpur to attend a conference on Islamic finance. In the past five years, Islamic finance has gained more and more prominence, as banks all over the world explore ways to tap into the great amount of wealth in the Middle East. Even DBS has moved (very seriously) into this area - hence we now have The Islamic Bank of Asia in Singapore.

Islamic finance, however, is a topic of which I have very little knowledge. And so, on the brief flight to KL, I found myself attempting to speed-read through an Islamic finance textbook. In the process, I became more intrigued by Islam, than by Islamic finance itself, and made a mental note to find out more about this religion.

Next morning, at the conference, I was one of the few non-Muslims in a predominantly Muslim audience. The conference speaker was a white man, with a very American accent. However, it quickly became apparent that he too was very Muslim. Abdulkader Thomas was his name, and as he went through the course, he spoke Arabic, wrote Arabic, quoted Islamic scholars, and referred often to the Quran and the life and times of the Prophet Mohammed.

Very curiously, at a certain time in the course, Abdulkader briefly alluded to having studied biblical Hebrew during university (could he have originally been Jewish?!), but I did not get any convenient chance to ask him about his unusual spiritual journey through life.

My personal mission was really to explore ways by which modern derivatives (famously described by Warren Buffett as "financial weapons of mass destruction") might be integrated with Islamic finance, and thereby be made palatable to Islamic clients. But it quickly became clear to me that I was on a long trip into uncharted waters. Abdulkader made it quite clear that this was an area with more questions than answers.

I am either on the edge of the next hot innovation in the investment banking world, or at the entrance of a long winding passage leading to a dead end. The religious underpinnings of Islamic finance are, well, very Islamic, and if I don't learn to think more like a Muslim, I doubt if I will go very far with the creation of new Islamic financial products,

Caught some TV from my hotel room this week - watching mostly Discovery Channel documentaries - and there were two which interested me, in particular. The first documentary was about João Teixeira de Faria, more popularly known as John of God, a faith healer in Brazil. This was the first time I'd heard of him, although apparently he has been doing his faith healing for decades and is already very well-known, receiving patients from many different countries.

The documentary showed, in rather graphic detail, John stabbing people with his unsterilised knife, slitting open their stomachs and back muscles etc, and pulling out their cancer tumours, cysts etc with his bare, exposed hands. As we would expect of faith healers, his patients experience no pain, and almost no bleeding, and apparently no post-operation infections either. Like Jane Roberts, John of God is a channeller. He calls upon "spirits of the dead" to enter his body, and use him as a vehicle to carry out the operations - thereafter, John himself has no recollection of how happened.

The second Discovery documentary was entitled Psychic Vietnam. This is about a Vietnamese government project to use a small number of psychics (tested and screened by government officials) to locate the remains of long-deceased, missing Vietnamese soldiers who had died during the Vietnamese war, 30 years ago. Here's a BBC commentary on the show. The actual documentary is quite interesting - it relates how the remains have been sent for DNA testing, and verified to be the remains of the person that the psychic says they are.

Visited the Kinojuniya bookstore at Suria KLCC and was pleasantly surprised to discover that its "Religion" section has much more variety than the one at Singapore's Kinokuniya, and this despite the fact that Malaysia is predominantly Muslim, while Singapore supposedly has more religious heterogenieity.

Two of my new acquisitions are "A Course in Miracles" (this is no ordinary "Christian" book, do click on link to find out how it was allegedly written) as well as "The Life And Teachings of Sai Baba of Shirdi" - India's mysterious, and living, godman (did you know he has a temple in Singapore too, somewhere around Moulmein Road?).

All in all, a rather interesting trip to KL, yielding much serendipitious, varied fodder for my metaphysical grazing.