British Universities Promote Sharia-Compliant Loans

Another country in Europe is bowing to Sharia law. England’s proposed “interest-free” student finance plan comes with a detail that might surprise the average graduate. Sign up, and the government expects you to pay exactly as much as the classmate who took out an ordinary loan. What changes is where your paycheck deductions go and who gets to certify the arrangement. Under the government’s plan, a separate fund would receive the money, and a board of Islamic finance specialists would determine whether the program meets the requirements of their faith.

University College London, Bristol, Leeds and Newcastle are among the universities publicizing the proposal. The government’s case is straightforward. Some Muslim students turn down conventional loans because their faith prohibits paying interest. To give them another way to cover tuition and rent, England would offer an “alternative payment” to any eligible undergraduate. Once graduates earn enough, the Student Loans Company would collect “contributions” and reserve the proceeds for future students who choose the same arrangement. That pooling of funds follows the Islamic principle of Takaful, or mutual support.

The proposal arrives amid a wider argument over how Islam is changing British life. In June, The Guardian detailed a study by British Future and the British Muslim Trust that found 17 percent of the public strongly agreed that “the growth in the Muslim population poses a foundational threat to UK culture”. On a separate question, 52 percent regarded British-born Muslims as every bit as British as white non-Muslims born in the country. The distinction matters in the fight over student finance. A voter can take a Muslim neighbor’s British citizenship for granted and still ask why a taxpayer-backed program needs a religious board’s seal of approval.

A similar argument broke out over first-cousin marriage while Conservative MP Richard Holden was seeking to ban the practice. NHS England’s genomics education program published an article that acknowledged the increased risk of genetic conditions in children born to first cousins, then laid out potential benefits of the marriages. Critics wanted to know why the health service had taken up that side of a live parliamentary dispute. NHS England pulled the article and said it had published it by mistake. A later review found that some of the language used in separate training materials for health workers was inappropriate.