Osama bin Laden created al-Qaeda in the belief that the West must be defeated by force. It was only after he saw the trillion-dollar-plus damage the 9/11 attacks wrought that he realized that America can best be defeated through economic means. Many Salafi strategists and Wahhabi thinkers had come to this conclusion long before bin Laden did. In fact the father of the concept, Abul-Ala Mawdudi, had written about economic jihad decades earlier, during the Cold War.Today America has no competitor militarily as it spends more on defence than all the other nations of the world combined. But at the same time, thanks in part to globalization -- which means nothing more than increased interdependence -- America is ironically more vulnerable than ever. The current global financial state of affairs is proof of that. The U. S. has become increasingly beholden to those nations and financial choke-points where the greatest concentration of American dollars and government bonds can be found. At the same time, imbalances in import-export ratios and declining domestic savings rates magnify the fact that the U. S. economy is more and more dependent upon the behaviour of political elites and institutions outside of its borders. As a result, the health of the U. S. economy and the Western economic system is more difficult to vouchsafe than ever before.
Even before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, there existed a push across Western financial markets to create shariah-compliant instruments and vehicles for Arab banks and Muslim consumers. Just open any issue of the Financial Times or The Economist for evidence of how successful this effort has been. The overall figures speak for themselves. Although not long established, shariah finance last year already totalled $1-trillion and has demonstrated on average a 12-15% annual growth rate. It is projected that by 2020 up to 60% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims will not use the services of normal secular banks but be putting their money in shariah-compliant institutions. As a result, the U. K. has already taken the strategic decision to make London the shariah finance capital of the world.