Ireland is one of many countries which has begun to look at Islamic finance as a way to help rebuild the financial services sector. Already Ireland is a base for 20 per cent of Islamic funds based outside of the Middle East, and the plan is to expand that even further.
“To someone like myself who has no particular expertise in the area, Islamic finance looks like a good fit for Ireland,” Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore told an audience during a speech last month.
Details of the plan emerged in a letter from American al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn to an unidentified recipient. The correspondence was found in the house in Pakistan where al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was shot dead by US forces last year.
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Ireland: Muslims asked to remove headscarves for new Garda cardREPRESENTATIVES OF Ireland’s largest Sunni mosque have raised concerns over incidents in which a number of Muslim women were asked to remove their headscarves to comply with new identification procedures at the Garda National Immigration Bureau in Dublin.
The new procedures, which include a biometric fingerprint-capture system, were introduced in recent weeks.(source)
IRELAND plans to become the first European nation to sell sovereign sukuk — Islam-approved financial certificates — as its equal tax treatment for Islamic-finance products attracts investors.
The Government has agreements with more than 60 countries to avoid double taxation on Islamic transactions, Micheál Smith, the south-east Asia director of IDA Ireland, said.(source)
CHILDREN WHO attend the Muslim primary school in Dublin's Clonskeagh are finding it increasingly difficult to get places at secondary schools in the area, a spokesman for the Islamic Cultural Centre has said. The children were born in Ireland and are Irish citizens.
Ali Selim said yesterday that the centre had received "a great number of complaints" from Muslim parents in south Co Dublin "regarding a limited number of schools that will only accept Catholic children". They are considering asking Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin to intervene, he said.
"I don't think this is right. All of us are taxpayers and preference should not be on the basis of religion or race. This is not a Muslim issue, it affects all non-Catholics."
(source)
The U.S. Embassy in Dublin has sponsored a seminar on Muslim entrepreneurs and business in Ireland. A main point of the conference was the need for Sharia law compliant financial products to be used.
The U.S. Embassy supported the conference as part of President Obama’s outreach to Muslims around the world.
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At the conference, Thomas Cooney, academic director of the Dublin Institute of Technology, stated that 76 per cent of Muslim business people in Ireland say securing finance is their biggest problem and 90 per cent said there is a need for financial products to be compliant with Islamic law.
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"I had no plans nor any intentions to plan to kill Lars Vilks," writes the Algerian man who was arrested in Ireland for planning to murder the Swedish artist.
The hand-written letter, sent to the Irish Examiner, is addressed to Vilks and "the Swedish people".
The Algerian is currently in custody, but according to the man's lawyer, it's not for murder plans, but rather for making a threatening call to a man in the US.
His wife, American Jamie Paulin Ramirez — "Jihad Jamie" — has been extradited to the US.
The man writes that Ramirez is sick and pregnant and that he's worried since he lost contact with her and nobody says where she is in the US.
"IT's as if she disappeared from the face of the earth to the Guantanamo camp," he writes in the letter, which Swedish news agency TT has part of.
[Ed.: Both American women suspected of planning to kill Vilks recently appeared in court.]
This article was prepared by the Islam in Europe blog - islamineurope.blogspot.com
Source: Skånska (Swedish)