Is there a way of promoting the values of Islamic finance as an ethical value-based financial system?
Crawford: In Australia, ethical or green investing has been a phenomenon for the past 10 to 15 years. So, Islamic finance may need a good 10 years to bridge the gap in order to catch up. Intrinsically there is a strong correlation with the two but there are certainly differences. Islamic finance describes the ethics under which the system operates and we should be proud of it. Awareness is an educational process. It’s not merely the end customers that we need to educate but the intermediaries as well. There are only about 3,000 of them and I think the current crisis will allow us even greater leverage to reach them. Ariff: Even for Malaysia, it has actually taken quite a while for Islamic finance to take off and we see countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore trying to promote it on a fast track basis. The problem is you need the regulators to come in and get the buy-in from the practitioners. Indonesia has tried to do it on a fast track basis but it hasn’t really worked. Yes,
