Commodities traders and senior M&A bankers are said to be doing well this year. It seems Islamic scholars aren’t doing too badly either.

Some Islamic scholars are being paid “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to approve Islamic finance products, according to an article in the Financial Times today.

Author Tarek El Diwany says scholars’ services are highly sought after because they need to approve products used in the growing Islamic finance market. Although scholars are the final arbiters of permissibility, in reality El Diwany says banks can dictate the rules of the game – even if 98 out of 100 scholars say a product is prohibited, a bank can employ the other two.

News of this windfall for scholars coincides with claims that the broker GFI is creating the first inter-dealer market for secondary trading in sukuks, or ‘Islamic bonds’, and will base the business in London.