May 29, 2007, on this blog: Crediting women
At that time I’d been reading a lot about Islamic banking, which is based on the Koran’s prohibition against charging interest. The Grameen Bank’s microlending doesn’t follow that model — it charges interest, like a Western bank, but ensures repayment with a peer-group system that’s proven far more effective than the use of collateral. So I asked the George Bailey of Bangladesh about this: Had he been criticized for charging interest in a Muslim country?
Dr. Yunus said he was surprised by how rarely this was even noticed. Grameen was often criticized, he said, for lending primarily to women (more than 90 percent of its loans). This criticism, he said, was often framed in religious terms, even though the Koran in no way forbids this.
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