veiled4allah: playing the market

Recently, I came across BlogShares, a fantasy stock market where you can trade shares in blogs. Some person I've never heard of bought up all of the public shares in my blog. Which I guess is flattering to me or something, that somebody thinks it's a good investment, but it doesn't seem like much fun for anybody else.

BlogShares doesn't list any outgoing links from my site, which means that nobody I link to is getting anything from me. The reason for this problem is that BlogShares only looks on the Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs main index page and not on the veiled4allah page, which is where all my links are located. This is a problem I have with a lot of these systems that track links on blogs, because I have a non-standard set-up. I submitted the URL for veiled4allah to BlogShares as an alternate but it apparently only counts inbound links to that page and not outgoing links on it. Sigh.

Anyway, according to the profile page for my blog, the current valuation is $6214.25. The price of a share, if any were available, is $2.22. I suppose it could be worse.

I wondered if stock trading is permissible according to Islam so I did some searching with Google. There is a general agreement of the scholars that owning shares in a company is lawful as long as the company is engaged in lawful business. A fatwa from conservative Saudi scholar Shaykh Muhammad al-Munajjid sets out some basic rules about what types of companies are lawful for investment and what are not. There are a growing number of companies that screen stocks and create indexes of companies that are Islamically acceptable.

But there is a second issue and that is trading in stocks. Speculation (gharar) and gambling are prohibited in Islam. To what extent does playing the stock market involve speculation? There isn't any consensus on this. Speculation and Gambling provides a good overview of some of the issues involved. Status of the Stock Exchange takes a dim view of most stock trading. Muslim Investor outlines the areas of concern but clearly feels that it is possible for Muslims to lawfully invest and trade in stocks, since it aims to be a resource for helping them to do so.

It seems that it's best to be cautious unless you're pretty sure of what you're doing and what the risks and benefits are.

Update: I sold 500 shares in my own blog (the owner automatically gets 1000) in order to put some out on the market. So on the off chance that you're interested, you can now buy shares of Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs, for only $2.84 a share