Are you inferring that a meeting like this would never be held during the current administrations term???
The Treasury Department held its first seminar on Islamic finance in April 2002, when then undersecretary for international affairs John Taylor told the meeting, “we have had a growing interest in Islamic finance because of its rapid growth and significant presence in many partners of the United States such as Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaysia and Pakistan.”
Speaking seven months after 9/11, Taylor also said it was crucial to ensure that legitimate Islamic banks, services and charities were not exploited by terrorists.
The 2002 seminar took place after then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill attended a meeting in Bahrain where participants described the philosophy behind Islamic finance. Taylor said the American officials had left that meeting “with a sense of what Islamic finance really is” and decided to host the seminar in the U.S. “to ‘demystify’ Islamic banking for our colleagues in Washington.”
Later that year, O’Neill’s successor, Secretary John Snow, and Taylor attended an International Islamic Finance Conference in Dubai.
Two years later, Taylor in a speech at an Islamic finance forum at Harvard that the topic was “very important to us in the Bush Administration.” He also announced a new Islamic finance scholar-in-residence program, naming Mahmoud El-Gamal of Rice University to the position.
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=38902
