Buying homes the Islamic way

Muslims learn how to avoid interest

By Dan Linehan
The Free Press

MANKATO — Abdulkdir Alasow has spent 26 years in the United States — seven of them in Mankato — but he says he hasn’t truly been a part of the communities he’s lived in.

As a devout Muslim, home ownership has been out of his reach.

Alasow’s religion prohibits him from charging or accepting interest. His only option, he thought, was to save up enough money to buy a house outright.

Hundreds of Muslim families in Mankato and across the country face the same plight.

It’s also a problem for public housing authorities like Mankato’s as they seek to move tenants from publicly funded apartment units into their own homes.

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Ijaraloans.com president Shoeb Sharieff visited Mankato on Monday to talk about the Ijara method, a way for Muslims whose faith prohibits them from paying interest to buy a home. John Cross / The Free Press

The president of a Michigan-based company, ijaraloans.com, was in Mankato on Monday, speaking to about two dozen Muslims and a handful of area lenders. His company helps banks and consumers understand the Ijara method, which company president Shoeb Sharieff said is economically the same as a regular home loan but satisfies rules required by Islamic law.

Alasow was positively gleeful after Sharieff’s presentation and said he has even chosen the house he wants to live in.

“I’m ready,” he said.

The Ijara method is like a typical mortgage, except with a few added steps to avoid the payment of interest.

Ijaraloans.com, or another entity, creates a trust, an entity that actually owns the home. In this case, the company would be the “trustee” and the consumer would be the “beneficiary” of the trust.

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About two dozen Muslims visited the Intergovernmental Center Monday to hear about the Ijara method, developed in 1995 as a way to help Muslims buy houses. John Cross / The Free Press

The resident then pays rent — and this is the key difference that makes the transaction Islamic — to the trust, instead of borrowing the money and paying interest on that.

So, from the consumer’s perspective, Ijara can best be summarized as “rent to own.”

Each month, the occupant pays rent for the house and a portion of that money goes toward the eventual purchase of the home. Much work has gone into making the Ijara process as cheap for the consumer as the typical mortgage, Sharieff said.

Islam, he said, encourages entrepreneurship and the charging of profit on goods (e.g. rent), but forbids the charging of profit on money (typically called interest). He said the rule is meant to discourage the wealthy taking advantage of the poor through unfair loaning practices.

Back home in Somalia, Halima Mumin says, families owned homes with backyards and everything, bought through traditional Islamic means. That’s especially important in Somalia, where it is typical to have eight, 10, even 15 children.

Source: Mankato Free Press, Aug 07, 2007