A postgraduate course linked to the UAB includes the Islamist banker Najia Lotfi as a lecturer
Najia Lotfi is a former deputy from a Moroccan party with ideological ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. She now appears as a lecturer on the Postgraduate Degree in Social and Solidarity Economy, linked to the UAB as a degree in its own right and funded by the Generalitat.
Muslims praying at UAB
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The Postgraduate Programme in Social and Solidarity Economy – Co-operative Studies is a nine-month course designed to train professionals and activists in co-operativism. The programme is coordinated, designed, managed and organised by the co-operative La Ciutat Invisible. Various representatives of organisations from the co-operative sector collaborate by delivering sessions, workshops or visits. And one of them is Former Moroccan MP Nafia Lofti of the Islamic bank CoopHalal in Barcelona.
The role of the UAB is to grant academic recognition to the postgraduate programme as a self-awarded title. It does so through the Metròpoli Institute, a consortium involving the university. The university does not directly deliver the training, nor does it recognise it as an official qualification, nor does it award credits, but it lends its seal to lend prestige to the qualification. For its part, The Generalitat of Catalonia assumes the main funding through public grants, a fact that guarantees the economic viability of the programme.
Najia Lotfi and the introduction of Sharia finance
In this university context, the presence of Najia Lotfi as a postgraduate lecturer stands out. Lotfi is president of CoopHalal, a cooperative-style bank dedicated to promoting Islamic finance. It markets products such as Islamic mortgages based on Sharia principles that convert the client into a tenant. The main selling point of this product is that it is presented as an ethical alternative to the conventional mortgage system because it carries no interest. This supposed ethics It is not based on universal or secular criteria, but on the fact that the operation has the endorsement of a committee of Sharia experts.. It is this confessional endorsement that It is used as moral surety for clients., and not shared principles of social justice, equality or civil rights.
His professional and public career It has focused on presenting Islamic economics as an ethical alternative to the conventional financial system.. In its discourse, the product is “ethical” not because it questions the financial model but because Subordinates economic activity to a religious authority that is ethical by definition because it comes from Allah and his Prophet.. In their advertising claims The starting point is to warn the believer that resorting to conventional banking is a sin..
The use of religion as a mechanism of moral pressure to attract savings is a central element of CoopHalal's public narrative, as shown in their own promotional videos. The central idea is that resorting to conventional banking constitutes a serious sin because it includes interest. After the spiritual warning, the discourse offers the solution: to resort to Sharia-certified financial products as the only morally acceptable way. From this point on, any economic or risk analysis is nullified because the priority is to do things according to what Allah revealed 1,400 years ago.
Religious economy in the world of the social economy
The social and solidarity economy is founded on principles such as the equality, economic democracy, institutional secularism and social emancipation. Islamic economics, on the other hand, It is based on a normative religious framework that subordinates economic activity to confessional precepts.. To subsume both realities under the same label of ’ethical economy“ It involves normalising an economy based on religious criteria within a space that presents itself as universal, inclusive and secular..
The inclusion of a religious profile like Najia Lotfi's in a postgraduate programme affiliated with the UAB is the latest episode in a process of institutional whitewashing that is not new: The Barcelona City Council has long been integrating CoopHalal into the Social and Solidarity Economy ecosystem with complete normality.. This involves presenting Islamic finance as an option as valid as any other at conferences, fairs or training events. This institutional integration has given it access to public promotion, support, grants and legitimacy in a financial project based on religious criteria.
Muslim religious entrism with public money
What is happening is not a simple case of economic pluralism, but a phenomenon of Islamic entrism.: It is infiltrating an ideological project into public institutions through a friendly language of ethics, cooperativism and the social economy. In this context, Najia Lotfi does not appear as a grassroots activist, rather than as a trained and situated leaderShe comes from an affluent background in Morocco, was a member of a Islamist party with ideological ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, has a high level of university education and operates with capital, structure and influence.
This legitimisation operation is also not new in the social and solidarity sphere. Najia Lotfi is an expat, but she has been presented in public forums of the Catalan social economy as a “migrant entrepreneur."” Alongside people who have truly experienced precarity, administrative irregularity or economic exclusion. This shift in narrative allows a confessional and ideological financial project to be inserted into spaces intended to protect the most vulnerable and to dilute class differences.
The presence of Najia Lotfi as a lecturer on the Postgraduate course in Social and Solidarity Economy is not an isolated incident, but rather the latest chapter in a sequence of clear signals pointing towards the normalisation of confessional religious presence within the Catalan social economy. When universities and administrations adopt this framework without debate or limits, what is at stake is not diversity, but the very meaning of a space that was meant to be secular, social and universal.
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