The Accounting and Auditing Organisation of Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI)

How Islamic finance treats conventional credit cards

The existence of interest, variation of charges on the basis of amounts of cash withdrawals using the cards and the fact that the default rates with quite punitive charges are some of the features that makes the conventional credit cards non-compliant from the Islamic perspective.
In order to comply with the Shariah principles and guidelines, Islamic banking has embraced the needs of customers by repackaging and reimagining existing conventional banking products or engineering innovative products. These help regulating human interactions and transactions to promote transparency, fairness, justice and accountability to each other. The provisions of interest, the financing of business ventures involving alcohol, arms trade and undertaking excessive risks as well as ambiguous contractual obligations that end up benefiting some parties in transactions at the expense of others, form part of the Shariah’s prohibitions. Credit cards are therefore considered offensive to the Shariah standards

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