If the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland had been a Muslim and had run his bank on Sharia-compliant principles, would it have prevented the disaster that has befallen RBS?
It sounds hypothetical in the extreme. Sir Fred is a Scots Presbyterian, and RBS was the epitome of gung-ho western capitalism before it came crashing down.
But the question came to me as I sat at a dinner in Dubai’s Grand Hyatt hotel this week, where 300 or so bankers and financiers had gathered to slap each other on the back at the Islamic Finance News Awards ceremony. If the financial world was run on Sharia lines, the backslappers concurred, we would not be in the middle of economic meltdown.
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