Seven long years ago, I had a chance to meet Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, a Pakistani scholar who is also a leading expert in Islamic finance. It was an unexpectedly memorable conversation. Back then, during the height of the credit bubble, there were very few people who expressed strong criticisms of how western finance worked. But Usmani was scathing. Most notably, he bewailed the tendency of American and European banks to create money untethered from any real assets; or, as he put it, to spin “derivatives out of more derivatives”. Indeed, to Usmani it seemed as if western finance was almost akin to a giant ball of candyfloss: a bubble of sticky froth, from which a few “real” assets or economic activities had been spun and re-spun to support numerous ephemeral financial deals, much in the way a tiny piece of sugar can be used to concoct a giant puffball. “Western banks create money from money,” Usmani told me, contrasting this with the world of Islamic finance, where “money is always backed by assets” and relies on “equity financing not debt”.