Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
You should first resort to Islamic finance. If you don’t find it, you may go to mortgage with the below restrictions.
In his response to your question, Prof. Dr. Monzer Kahf, Professor of Islamic Finance and Economics at Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies, states:
The Fatwa on conventional mortgage if Islamic finance is not available is correct and adopted by the second international conference on Fiqh held in Detroit in the fall of 1999.
However, it has the following conditions:
1- It is for families who require housing for themselves for reasons of security, education, neighborhood, etc.
2- There must be no Islamic finance available for them.
3- It is for residence not for investment.
I suggest that you should check first for Islamic finance, there are several companies which offer it in Canada and US.
Almighty Allah knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.