The Malaysian Prime Minister has suggested that Muslim nations should ditch the U.S. dollar as the common trading currency and instead opt for gold.
At a press conference after the conclusion of the Kuala Lumpur Summit 2019, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said the U.S. dollar, as the current international currency, was subject to fluctuations in value but gold has a certain value for all countries in the world.
“If we use gold as a standard, we can call our currencies by whatever name but they must relate to the value of gold in your (particular) country. If you know the value of gold in your country, and the gold in the trading partner, then we know how much gold is worth during the trade and we can call that as the gold dinar as a standard,” he said.
He added: “For as long as we are dependent on the technology created by the enemies of Islam, they will forever be able to circumvent, dictate and control our efforts to improve our technologies and defence system in particular.”
Meanwhile, he also called on rich Muslim countries to invest in poor ones to establish a stronger alliance.
Dr Mahathir said Muslim countries would not be subjected to forced assimilation and trade sanctions if they were self-reliant and work with other Muslims nations.
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“We are not rejecting investments from non-Muslim countries. But we feel Muslim countries so far have not invested enough in other Muslim countries who need their investments. We hope, as a result from this conference, many more Muslim countries which are rich enough invest in the poorer countries.”
Earlier, Dr Mahathir said the conference was not aimed at replacing other Muslim platforms such the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
“It is a congregation of a few Muslim nations (Malaysia, Qatar, Iran and Turkey) of which some of the leaders wanted to get together and discuss some areas that are possible for us to establish collaborations that will first benefit the nations involved and then taken onto a bigger platform and collaboration to benefit the Muslim world as a whole,” he said.
Dr Mahathir said there were 1.8 billion Muslim population globally, representing almost a quarter of the total human population but Muslim countries lacked proportionate representation in all fields in the global platform.
“The idea was to come together, assessing our strengths and weaknesses as well as our assets. Then, we will use the strength of one another to overcome the weaknesses we have. Simply put, if one of us has an expertise in a particular area, we offer it to another or all the other participating countries and establish a realistic collaboration,” he added.
