Of all the ways Islamophobia operates, the one that gets least attention is also the most total: being quietly cut off from the banking system. A March 2023 study found that Muslims are the faith group most likely to report problems with financial institutions.

The study, Banking While Muslim, was published by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and authored by Professor Youssef Chouhoud. It set out to test whether financial institutions across America are disproportionately placing Muslims under suspicion and restricting what they can do with their own accounts.

What It Reaches

The restrictions documented run from the institutional to the almost absurdly mundane: the ability to run a civic or charitable organisation, to open a personal bank account — and, at the other end of the scale, to buy a cinema ticket through PayPal or Venmo.

The researchers set out the stakes at the start:

Banking is at the heart of what allows individuals and institutions to function and contribute. If it is indeed being systemically obstructed, this type of institutional discrimination risks disenfranchising an entire community economically and politically.

Banking While Muslim, ISPU, 2023

That is the difference between this and most measures of discrimination. A person can be refused service by an individual and go elsewhere. A person cut off from the payments system cannot participate in economic life at all — and neither can the charity they run.

It Reached Congress

In December 2022, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Senator Elizabeth Warren led a sign-on letter, backed by a dozen House and Senate lawmakers, to US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, urging the Treasury to reassess policies that discriminate against Muslim Americans and communities of colour in banking and financial transactions.

Countless U.S. individuals, businesses, and charities have been victims of discriminatory policies and practices that appear to limit their access to financial services because of their religion or national origin. Many Muslim and Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans, simply because of their connections — real or perceived — have been systematically cut off from financial services.

Congressional sign-on letter, December 2022

Why SAMNET Is Sharing It

Because this is the form of Islamophobia that never looks like hostility. Nobody says anything. An account is closed, a transfer is declined, a charity’s banking is withdrawn “for compliance reasons”, and there is nothing to report to anybody — no slur, no incident, no perpetrator.

South African Muslim charities and businesses will recognise the shape of it, particularly any that have tried to move money for humanitarian work. What we do not have, here, is the research that turns a hundred private frustrations into a finding somebody has to answer for. That is what a study like this one does.

Shared by the South African Muslim Network in the interest of educating about the impacts of overt and hidden Islamophobia. info@samnet.co.za