Prosperous Peddler

The wealth of the Arab world glitters in Beirut, but the citadel of Arab finance is an undistinguished grey-walled building in Amman on the edge of the Jordan desert. It is the Arab Bank, the first as well as the largest Arab-owned bank. Its bluff, barrel-chested founder and chairman is Abdul Hameed Shoman, 75, a onetime haberdashery peddler who ranged the U.S. before returning home to open a bank dedicated as much to helping Arabs as it is to making profits. Shoman excels at making helping pay. Last week, as the Arab Bank released its 1962 report, everything set new records: operating profits rose to $13.1 million, v. 1961's $9,200,000; deposits climbed to $220 million; and total assets jumped to $313 million. Shoman's bank has 2,000 employees and 43 branches that cover the Arab world, but Shoman is not content with being merely a banker to the Arabs; he recently opened branches in Zurich and

Nigeria, and is now planning to expand into the U.S. and Latin America.

A Small Hello. Born and raised in a stone hut in a primitive village four miles north of Jerusalem, Shoman at 23 emigrated to the U.S. and became a door-to-door salesman of dry-goods products. "I only knew how to say 'cheap, cheap' and then make finger signs to show the price," he says. What he lacked in English he more than made up in hard work. He soon opened a dressmaking factory in Manhattan's garment district, where an Arab was bound to get a small hello. He was homesick. Seeing how U.S. banks helped small businesses to get on their feet, Shoman decided that what the Arabs needed was their own bank--an enterprise that no Moslem had so far undertaken because of the Koran's injunction against usury. Devout Shoman felt certain that the Prophet had not meant to forbid honest commercial banking, and in 1929, taking the considerable money he had earned in the U.S., he returned to Palestine.

By carefully investing in a wide range of new industries and public works from Casablanca to Baghdad, Shoman's new Arab Bank acted as a catalyst for Arab economic development in the days when no one was willing to bet on it. Says Shoman: "There would not be any industry here if we had not helped finance it." Arab Bank loans created jobs for more than 100,000 workers, and in Jordan the bank's loans for new cement, textile, and food-processing plants have given the country a growth rate in the Middle East second only to oil-rich Kuwait. Aside from commercial loans, Shoman gave millions of his own and the bank's money to Arab charities, has sent hundreds of Arab students to Western universities. Sentimentally, unschooled Shoman has built a $600,000 teachers training college in his native village, Beit Hanina.

Out for Unity. Despite his wealth, he shuns luxuries, has no hobbies, and usually reads himself to sleep over bank reports. So strict a Moslem is he that he prays toward Mecca five times a day, allows none of his employees to drink, smoke or eat pork in his presence. Unimpressed by pomp, he treats peddlers, peasants and princes alike. He knows almost every Arab ruler from Ben Bella to King Saud, royally says of Jordan's King Hussein: "He is like one of my sons, but I tell him when he is wrong."

Two years ago, when Nasser nationalized all the banks in the United Arab Republic, Shoman lost six branches. When Syria and Iraq recently announced their intention to merge with Egypt, the threat of losing twelve more branches would have driven most bankers to despair. But Shoman believes that any step toward Arab unity is worth some losses. "If the Arab world could be joined together and Arabs could trade freely, they would prosper like Americans," he says. "For the sake of Arab unity, I'll give it all away." He may not have to: aside from his family's 37% ownings, 2,040 Arab investors in 15 nations have a stake in the Arab world's leading bank.

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