NewHorizon, the magazine published in English on Islamic banking and insurance, runs a feature on Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad and presents his views on the problems with Islamic finance in the UK.

From the article, '‘We Muslims should hold firmly onto the value that the interest-based system is prohibited.’ However, Al Haddad is also a prominent critic of supposedly Shari’ah-compliant finance in the UK and elsewhere. His main criticism is the way in which riba is interpreted in a literal, semantic way by equating it to the word ‘interest’. What this allows is for a system to be devised in which the flow of money and the share of risk between agents is completely equivalent in a supposedly halal transaction to a conventional transaction based on interest. ‘My problem with Shari’ah-compliant finance is that the whole process is more or less the same’ as conventional banking, he explains. The effect of this is that the prohibition of riba makes no noticeable difference to finance.'

Read more here.