Says their scheme of insurance practice is “gambling”
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| Mr Joof, MD Takaful Islamic Insurance Company |
The managing director of Takaful Gambia Limited, the only insurance company that operates in Shariah compliance principles, has condemned the operating principles of conventional insurance companies saying “it is not fair as it is based on gambling”.
Momodou M. Joof claimed that conventional insurance practitioners cannot define insurance in any way apart from buying and selling.
“Insurance can only be seen as somebody selling and somebody buying and under a buying and selling principle there is a strict warning from Allah that ‘what you pay for must be equivalent to what you are getting’. So when you come to them and say ‘I have a vehicle which is D100,000 value and I want to insure it’, they tell you to pay D10,000; when you pay this D10,000 they gave you a piece of paper.
“The piece of paper you bought from them for D10,000 that is what they call insurance and it states that when you suffer a loss they will pay you, but what about when you don’t suffer a loss.”
Mr Joof said further that nobody wants to get into a contract that will only benefit them when they get into an accident. For example, he said, when you insure your house against fire, they (the conventional insurance practitioners) will tell you that you will only benefit when your house is on fire. If it is marine insurance they will tell you that you will only benefit when your boat/ship sinks at sea.”
“What we stand for at Takaful Insurance is fairness,” MD Joof said, adding: “Our policy is that insurance can only be categorised under trade, and that is buying and selling. Buying and selling must be such that the price of what you are buying must be equivalent to what you are gaining. So you cannot charge me D10,000 only for you to give me a piece of paper and at the end of the year when nothing happens, when I come back again to renew the policy, you will still charge me more; that is not done.”
The Takaful CEO said Islam states that when one belongs to an organisation and suffer a loss the person goes back to the organisation and get paid, “which is good”. But the conventional insurance practitioners should polish such an arrangement or policy to make it acceptable in the eyes of Islam, he said, adding that what is acceptable in the eyes of Islam “must be transparent”; it must not be gambling”.
Mr Joof, who spent the greater part of his insurance career with conventional insurance companies, said the operating principle of conventional insurance is based on gambling because “when you suffer a loss they pay you more than you will have paid them, but when you don’t suffer a loss, you lose the whole of your money in the cause of the year: this is gambling”.
