As the financial institutions of Britain and the west increasingly — and disturbingly — come under the control of Islamic interests, Daniel Pipes has written an extremely timely and important analysis of this phenomenon. In particular, he makes the devastating observation that, far from the story we are told that Islamic financial precepts are a religious requirement and therefore not to enable Muslims in the west to live by them amounts to religious discrimination, the truth is that Islamic finance is

an ‘invented tradition’ that emerged in the 1940s in India. The notion of an economics discipline ‘that is distinctly and self-consciously Islamic is very new.’ Even the most learned Muslims a century ago would have been dumbfounded by the ‘Islamic economics.’

It was invented in order to

minimize relations with non-Muslims, strengthen the collective sense of Muslim identity, extend Islam into a new area of human activity, and modernize without Westernizing.

In other words, Islamic finance is a political and ideological weapon which was devised as a means of subjugating the west to Islam. It was conceived as a direct threat to the west – and our willingness to embrace this danger to our identity and freedom shows once again just how suicidally ignorant we are.