Over the next year, the U.S. government will need to borrow somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 trillion, the most ever by far. Estimates go as high as $2 trillion, depending on how quickly the economy cools and how fast tax revenues fall. The simple question most of America has not asked is this: Where is the money going to come from? The federal government already knows the answer to that question, and it has implications Americans are not ready for but will soon be faced with.

America is going cap in hand to Middle East oil exporters. What government officials are not telling you is this: Islamic money comes with strings attached. Yes, sharia law “stipulates that money must not be used for a purpose incompatible with Islam” (Financial Times, April 26, 2007; emphasis mine). America will increasingly have to comply with sharia law, and what that entails isn’t pretty.

Sharia law is the religio-political-legal code that political Islam seeks to impose worldwide. With regard to banking, it bans the payment and collection of interest (a principle taught in the Bible as well), restricts what type of companies investors can be involved with (meaning no pork or alcohol handlers, etc.) and, in some cases, is blatantly used for the express purpose of working toward overthrowing the U.S. Constitution and government in favor of Islamic rule.

So it is astounding that Washington is embracing a set of foreign laws that have the potential to radically change life in America.

The stage has already been set, the Washington Times has reported. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt recently visited Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states for the express purpose of convincing the Arabs to recycle oil money back into America. While in Riyadh, Kimmitt said the government is studying how useful Islamic banking could be in fighting the current world economic crisis.

And now the Treasury Department has announced it will begin teaching “Islamic Finance 101” to Congress, U.S. banking regulatory agencies, and parts of the executive branch.

“Evidently, the price demanded by his hosts is that the U.S. government get with the Islamist financial program,” says Frank Gaffney Jr., Washington Times columnist and president of the Center for Security Policy.

So the U.S. Treasury Department is submitting itself to sharia banking law because America desperately needs money. And the oil-rich Arabs have it. As Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”

But sharia-compliant finance is dangerous, especially the principal of zakat—which mandates that profits must be “purified” by donating 2.5 percent to approved “Islamic charities.” The charities are chosen by select sharia scholars such as Sheik Qaradawi, a premier sharia authority in the field of economics.

Qaradawi, for his part, recently stated that U.S.-style capitalism should be replaced with an “Islamic economic system.”

He is also currently banned from entering the United States and United Kingdom because of his links with terrorism.

Some of these “approved charities” are connected to militant Islam, and have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, al Qaeda, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Gama’a al Islamiya, and the Tunisian An-Nahda.

“Sharia-compliant finance is a program that has been described by its leading practitioners as ‘financial jihad’ against the United States,” says the Coalition to Stop Sharia, a bipartisan coalition of public policy organizations and human rights groups.

Imagine the prospect of hundreds of U.S.-based companies contributing to Islamic charities and unknowingly funding anti-American organizations because they have taken sharia money from Islamic lenders. The amounts we are talking about could be astounding.

Sound far-fetched?

You may not have to imagine much longer. The U.S. banking crisis has struck hard. Washington isn’t the only one out of money. Many American companies are facing unprecedented credit crunches and are turning to foreign investment to keep daily operations running. And, like the U.S. government, many of these companies have plugged the gap with Islamic financing.

Even Boeing, the U.S. military contractor and largest aerospace company in the United States, announced October 31 that it had entered into talks with Gulf banks to obtain sharia-compliant funding. A report from the Royal Bank of Canada earlier this year said that hundreds of U.S. financial institutions were at risk of failure. These are companies that desperately need cash injections if they are to survive.

The simple reality is that the money needs to come from somewhere. And those with the money are those who dictate the terms.

Yesterday, the U.S. government announced it was giving aig another $40 billion loan. Taxpayers already own 80 percent of this company, but what taxpayers may not know is that aig is the mother company of aig Takaful Enaya, a sharia-compliant insurance company.

American taxpayers already obey sharia law.

But the bigger worry is that the U.S. Treasury may encourage troubled U.S. financial institutions that are already hungrily eyeing Arab petrodollars into even tighter agreements with Islamic lenders.

Thanks to the extraordinary power conferred on it since the approval of the $700 billion bailout package in September, the Treasury “is now in a position to impose its embrace of sharia on the U.S. financial sector,” Gaffney continues. The Treasury’s nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the purchase of—at last count—17 banks, and the ability to choose who gets loans and who doesn’t can translate into enormous coercive power. This is made all the more real since Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari is intimately involved with the Islamic Finance 101 program.

Wall Street is broken, and Treasury officials realize the size of the crisis may exceed the government’s ability to contain it. As a result, the Treasury is doing everything it can to make foreign money available.

Unfortunately, the consequences of foreign indebtedness will not be contained to Wall Street.

“Sharia-compliant finance serves as a leading edge of the spear for those seeking to insinuate sharia into Western societies,” says Gaffney. Sharia law may be coming to a home near you.

Britain offers a good case in point. Earlier this year, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams invoked a storm of controversy when he said that it was “unavoidable” that sharia would be practiced in his country. His main support for this was that the UK had already submitted itself to sharia-compliant finance and that the social and religious aspects of sharia law were already flowing out from there.

Once you are the debtor, you increasingly lose the ability to resist the influence of the foreign lender—economically, socially, politically and otherwise. How do you say no to your creditors? In biblical terminology, the lender becomes the head and the borrower becomes the tail (Deuteronomy 28:44).

Now Britain is increasingly dealing with an internal Islamic society with its own parallel judicial system run by Islamic lawmakers. Her Majesty’s government has allowed the establishment of at least five sharia courts to hear family law cases. And polygamists in the UK can now also get public welfare for each of their wives as long as the second, third and/or fourth marriages were performed overseas.

In Canada, the quasi-legal, self-interest-group-dominated Human Rights Commission now has the power to levy fines and other punishments if it deems certain companies have offended Islamic practitioners. You can read about how the Canadian Islamic Congress dominates the Human Rights Commission in Canada, restricting freedom of speech and even religious expression, in “Canada’s War on the Bible and Free Speech.”

In America too, Islamic groups are pushing for a parallel legal system in which sharia law would be practiced. The American Muslim argues that American Indian tribal courts are a precedent that could be used as a model for an Islamic arbitral system in the U.S.

If sharia law coming to America doesn’t shock you, it is probably because you are unfamiliar with its full ramifications. Here are some of its more controversial aspects, as reported by WorldNetDaily:

• A woman is eligible for only half the inheritance of a man.
• A virgin may be married against her will by her father or grandfather.
• A woman may not leave the house without her husband’s permission.
• A Muslim man may marry four women, including Christians and Jews; a Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim.
• Beating an insubordinate wife is permissible.
• Adultery [or the perception of adultery] is punished by death by stoning.
• Offensive, military jihad against non-Muslims is a religious obligation.
• Apostasy from Islam is punishable by death without trial.
• Lying to infidels in time of jihad is permissible.

If you think living in America during the current economic downturn isn’t fun, think of what living in sharia America would be like.

Americans should be asking themselves some serious questions—and ones that go beyond whether or not they want to be subjugated to sharia law. Americans should ask why this country is even considering dealing with Islamic lenders in the first place. What has happened to this great nation that was once not just the lender to the world, but also the picture of prosperity?

Why are we in such a state that we are willing to go to such extremes as subjugating ourselves to aspects of sharia law? The truth is, sharia money is a last-ditch effort by the U.S. government to prop up America’s slowly falling economy.

What have we done to turn the world’s greatest lender into the world’s neediest borrower? You can find the answers to these critically important questions in The United States and Britain in Prophecy.

America being forced to go cap in hand to the Islamic Middle East for money? America’s forefathers would be astounded. The sad thing is that the economy is in such a precarious position that if foreigners stopped lending, the economy would seize up, businesses would collapse and the standard of living in America would revert multiple decades overnight. The borrower is servant to the lender. It is increasingly evident that America is a servant to its foreign creditors.