Monem Salam:
Welcome to Halal Money Matters sponsored by Saturna Capital. I'm Monem Salam. You know, have you ever wondered, you know, how many Muslims there are in the US, where they live, how much they make, what do they buy, what do they sell, all those things? There was a recent report that actually came out as a result of a conference that happened with called Thrive. It happened in Dallas. It was a really great conference. happened to be there. But while I was there, I met up with my good friend Rafi-uddin Shikoh, who actually authored the actual report. And so we have an exciting episode. Rafi-uddin has been a managing director and CEO of Dinar Standard, who actually came up with this report. But he's actually done work in about 12 different countries in the Middle East, in ASEAN, in the US. And he's also spoken at multiple different institutions, media, universities, and those types of things. Really excited to have him to be able to talk a little bit about the Muslim community in America and where they are. Let's dig in.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Walaikum Assalamu good to be back, good to see you again.

Monem Salam:
Yeah, really, I still remember one of the earlier episodes we did and we were just talking a little earlier about this and probably been about four or five years. But to me, it was one of my favorite episodes. It was about the economics of Ramadan and inflation, food inflation, all that kind of thing. So I'm really excited to have you back on the show.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Same here, same here. Thank you. Thank you for having me on and congratulations on persevering and continuing this platform. It's a very important platform to continue and be persistent. So.

Monem Salam:
Yeah, it's great. I really enjoy these podcasts. And a lot of times it's just a one-on-one conversation with a friend of mine. So I really appreciate that. But it's interesting because the most difficult part about this whole thing is coming up with ideas to talk about. That's kind of the hardest part. Everything else just flows through or does everything like that. So it's kind of nice to be able to come up with, especially what you're working on or just finished up on, what I wanted to talk about. It's very, very interesting to discuss. I'm glad you were able to join. I wanted to start off and kind of give our listeners a little bit about what Dinar Standard does, because I think it sets the stage for what we're going to talk about in the entire episode. maybe briefly about a minute or so if you can just mention about your history, what you're doing now, what you've been working on, that type of thing would be great.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Great. So the North Standard has been a labor of love. I founded the firm in 2005 and more as a hobby to really look at the global Muslim world in terms of their economic landscape, economic activity, innovation, brands, and inspired primarily by the fact that the Muslim world is not really a major contributor to the global economy in the sense of, if you look at global brands or innovations, they're primarily consumers and of course, we're commodity providers. But when it comes to value added innovations and true contributions, there was not much. And so I was inspired to, this is post 9-11, I was inspired to see that the bad rap the Muslim world was getting is countered by what good the Muslim world is doing. And especially with my background in business strategy and consulting, saw that there's not much of business or innovation leadership that is coming from the Muslim world. And that led me to really focus on this first and foremost because Muslims today with roughly 2 billion population plus, 2 billion plus now represent almost quarter of the world's population, incredibly diverse, spread all over the world. They have the land, the resources, the talent, the money. Yet in this last century, if you look at the top 100 global brands list that's produced by Interbrand or BCG's top 50 most innovative companies in the world, or even Fortune 100 companies or Fortune 500, literally not much at all. In fact, in the global brands, zero, even, and this was 2005 to today, in the Fortune 500, have maybe four or five, maybe four companies, starting with Saudi Aramco and then SABIC, which are linked to oil and a few retail brands from Turkey.

Monem Salam:
So there is government and private sector both, right? Because I think Saudi Aramco technically is a government owned. I know they have the free float in the market, but most likely they, yeah. Okay.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Right, Yeah, both. So in fact, the first thing I did, Monem, was, and I think you remember this, I started the United States with this DS100 ranking. Top 100 businesses from the Muslim world that were both publicly listed, actually not just both, publicly listed or privately owned or government owned. So to the best of our ability to get their revenue, verifiable revenue data. We built a database of top 5,000 businesses or entities from the Muslim majority countries, which is the 57 organization of Islamic cooperation member countries. Those companies that are domiciled from there and made a list out of that of top 100 called it Dinar Standard 100, The Economist magazine and All Major Media in Turkey because Turkey had 25 of the top 100 companies on the list. know, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Indonesia covered that list. So that got me to think that I'm onto something because apparently no one had looked at it that way. That started really the thesis that the Muslim majority countries have a unique set of challenges as well as potentially unique set of opportunities.

And fast forward now with that thesis and doing a lot of original research. Now we're essentially a strategy consulting firm specializing in the Muslim majority country markets and enabling their growth, their empowerment. And today we're working with government agencies, economic development agencies on economic growth policies, job creation, FDI, as well as working with private equity fund, Islamic private equity and even sovereign wealth funds on this unique thesis of opportunities vis-a-vis this Islamic economy, so to say.

Monem Salam:
That's great. That's great. So recently now you focusing a little more on the US now you recently published a report on the American Muslim consumer on the business side, how much they spend, how much businesses or dollar wise money is sloshing around in North America itself.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Yes. So we had done a report about, I would say the last edition we did was seven years ago and we had not refreshed it. And this was produced as part of this American Muslim Conference. And the focus was to identify the size of the American Muslim wallet. How much is the household spending? Where are they spending? Where are they located? And so we, at this recent event in Dallas, we had produced this update to the report and much expanded that included not only the consumer landscape, which I'll go into, right, we'll talk about it, but also mapping the business, the small business landscape, businesses that are owned by Muslim founders or Muslims as owners of these businesses. Sizing their economic impact, again, what type of businesses they're doing and where are they, what sectors they are, et cetera. So that was sort of the broader focus of this report.

Monem Salam:
Yeah. So overall, let's start with the kind of the, uh, for me, at least as the, uh, very hotly debated topic of how many Muslims there are in the US right now. I remember back in, even in the 1990s, uh, people used to say there are 7 million Muslims in the U S. Uh, never believed it, but let's, let's just go with that. Uh, Pew has it as somewhere on now or somewhere on 2.3 million, but I think you, you, um, as far as the report was concerned, um, you, you pinned it at about 7.47 million. Correct.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Yeah.

Monem Salam:
So can you tell us a little bit about the discrepancies and how you were able to do it, how you came up with this number?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Sure. As you said, this is a very hotly debated topic because there isn't census data by virtue of the way we do census here. Religious data is not collected. Religious affiliation is not collected. Canada it is. So Canada was pretty straightforward for us to get that estimate. But in US, there are estimates.

Monem Salam:
So just to tell you, so in the report, says there's 765,000 in the greater Toronto area, right? So does that mean that that was by census in 2020? Is that?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Right. the Toronto, the Canada one, we focused primarily on the Toronto CMA region, which is a wider metropolitan Toronto area, specifically for two reasons. One, we, know, initially we knew the majority concentration is in that area. And from the scoping of our work, we, we didn't, couldn't cover all of Canada at that time, but Canadian census does report the religious affiliation from the census point of view. So indeed, we were able to derive it. And I believe, you know, the latest numbers for Canada would have been from 2021 census, I believe. But it's in the report. And if I got it wrong, please forgive me. But it's in the report. But yes, in the case of Canada, in the case of US, it is contentious for that very reason, because they're, the best, the only way you can do it is grassroots through a census to get you know, the highest level of confidence. But then there are other studies that, know, Pew, as you gave the example, they have their methodology. We were very careful. And in fact, as a headline, I would say we estimated the population in 2024 to be 7.47 million in the United States of those who are Muslims who identify themselves as Muslim. Okay, it's important to kind of caveat the nuance or the definition of it, those who identify themselves as Muslim. And we are quite confident this is a highly conservative number. So in fact, our estimates were much higher. We really kind of looked at some of the aspects and took a very conservative route. we talk about that as well in the report as to the reason why it is potentially more than 7.47 million.

Monem Salam:
So on the high side, how much would it be?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
So the high side we were looking at 11.5 to 12 million was our higher, not as a, I mean, it was still a good level of confidence, but this we felt was something that is solid in our view. And there's multiple sources that we were able to use to triangulate to this level of low baseline level of confidence. The methodology in brief is that there is an organization, ASARB, that is an association of religious body that does a survey, all religious congregations across the country, across all faith groups. Muslim congregations are included. Dr. Ehsan Bagby, who is a well-recognized statistician, was who had led that survey on the Muslim congregations. So we use the latest work they had was from 2020. We use that as a baseline number. And that estimation of the congregation was of Muslims who are the number of people who are attending a mosque. I shouldn't use the word mosque, but any gathering, congregation. Muslim congregation that could be a small gathering. It doesn't have to be a formal mosque. that's because he has it very clear in the definition because we use that as a baseline. From that baseline, we recognize that these are we also looked at ISPUs study that had identified what percentage of those who identify Muslims don't attend mosque at all. And so we, and I believe it was around 14% or some percentage. And again, it's laid out as well as the congregation study looked at people that are attending the congregation once a week and factoring the fact that you have a lot of women who don't come to the congregation and children. Our population sizing here is not just adult, it's the full population. That's another caveat. So the Pew one, believe, is only adults, whereas our population is estimated saying the full household, everyone included. And those who are, you know, so to say, quote unquote, practicing, and we derive based on that, again, using both the ISPU's credible surveyed estimation and applying it to this US the baseline from ASARB. That's how we were able to get 7.47 million. We also triangulated this with because the data from ASARB is at a it's at a granular level because it's by state by city I mean by zip code even so we have sort of that granular level of baselining. We use that to derive state by state, city by city estimate. And we were also able to triangulate or verify with other individual city level surveys that have been done. So for example, there are study done on Muslim population in New York City. And, you know, so we kind of looked at that. There are other studies across different geographic areas to also do a sanity check of this baseline estimation. As I said, the higher side was 11, 12, but we looking at some of these other sources and doing some verification, we did adjustments and we landed with a 7.47 weakness.

Monem Salam:
Good. And just for clarity purposes, ISPU is Institute of Social Policy and Understanding. Just to clarify to our listeners. OK, so now you've done 7.47 million. And I think you also came up with the spending habits of roughly about 170 billion or so. And that number is fine. But I guess let's define what you mean by spending, right? Because I guess if I look at, if I take 170 billion divided by 7.7 million, that's only about 22,000. So it can be that they're only spending 22,000 because they have obviously they're mortgages and other things like that. if you can define, what was that 170 billion that you actually, what that number is basically.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Right. So it's the household spending. each and we baseline that by taking the average household spending off of US overall. So there is a Department of Labor issues the household spending and they also issue the breakdown by category of spending. So you ask the question of, OK, what do we mean by spending? This is the main categories that are housing and housing services, transportation, services, education, food, food and food services, clothing, medical, personal care, charity, recreation, savings. So we took the baseline as the average American household spending. Then we, first of all, we calculated the total household spending based on the multiplying the total population by the average household spending and adjusting it based on the survey we did. As you know, we also had done our own national survey. The input to the sizing was to see if the level of spending relative to average household spending in the United States. What percentage is it higher for housing or education? And so we applied from our survey adjustment into the average household spending of the US.

Monem Salam:
So does household spending translate to household income?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Household spending would translate into household income. That's correct.

Monem Salam:
So the average Muslim in America roughly makes about 22,000 a year.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
No, no, because you're multiplying 7.47 million, remember, it's not 7.47 million households. So you have an average size of the household. So you have to divide a household is, you know, we have because between Pew and IcePew, have estimate of average size of the household. Maybe four or five or six, I can't remember. So kind of have to divide that and then divide your 170 billion, which then will give you an over 100k, I think.

Monem Salam:
That makes sense. That makes sense. So now 100k would actually put us at a higher level, probably than the average population, is good. So now let's look at the 170 billion that you talk about. mean, this information, there's the booklet you came up with, Mashalla, like a Wealth of Knowledge. It's like so much in depth that you must have spent quite a bit of time. There are certain sections, obviously, in there. But generally speaking, before we get into the savings and the pensions and those type of part of it, generally speaking, what would you say about the spending habits of Muslims in the US?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
So one of the things that is important to highlight is we found comparatively where the Muslim household spending more than the average household spending. And one of the key ones that stands out that's much higher than the average as a relative percentage of household spending is on education. And also, let me just make sure before I say so. For sure, but there, I believe within personal insurance and pensions or savings as well, it is higher. But education was clearly distinctly much higher and we're looking to double click on it, so to say, because education financing then becomes a big area, which has come up in the survey as a big area of gap as well. And I know one of us in the area we've talked about too, so.

Monem Salam:
So, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So, when you talk about education, you're talking about the spend that comes from everything from elementary, primary, secondary education. Does it also include like saving for that as well? Or is that what we consider like in the pensions and savings category?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Because the overarching education spending breakdown that we got was at a high level, looking at the calculation of the derived from average household spending that the Department of Labor puts out and then applying it to the Muslim population and then adjusting it based on the survey, we don't know exactly what that would include. But within education, based on our survey as well, it would imply certainly the spending on education, which is either, you know, being done through savings or, you know, it's being done through, you know, the cash on hand or however they have. But saving for education is an area that comes up in the survey. So, yes, we would have to double click on it as a separate study. But right now, the education spending implies savings for Education too, also.

Monem Salam:
Okay. That's great. And so now we come to you did have a very good section on their section in there in the actual kind of spending, which talked about pensions and savings and those type of things. And so looking at it in general, because you know, our listeners can always double click go deeper into the survey. What did you find as far as some from some interesting facts about so about the Muslims and their idea for savings and what they actually look for. So let's first start with their knowledge of it and also then the amount that they're actually doing.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Great. Let me if I can take a step back, Monem, I think it's good to kind of contextualize also the demographic profile, generational and age wise because that is also driving different habits and because you know, American Muslim population is not monolith, know, both ethnically, generationally and know, socioeconomic profile wise too, so the habits are quite distinct and different.

Monem Salam:
And also I think I read in your report, but also another one from ISPU that talked about we are the most diverse religious group in the country. So you're absolutely right.
Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Exactly. In fact, this is the very recent one. ISP just released their latest American Muslim poll in which exactly that benchmark to other faith groups, American Muslims are the most diverse amongst any of the other faith groups. And that is evident in our study as well. demographic wise, first of all, this is still 59 % of first generation. So let me just kind of caveat that a little bit. The immigrant, which is significant majority of the American Muslim population is immigrant. But we will also want to acknowledge the fact that there is a significant percentage that have been, I don't want to use the word indigenous, I think we use another term, that have been here in the United States as Muslims for over a century, right, or so forth. But the numbers I'm going to talk about are the ones who are considered, let's say, last 60, 70 years immigrant population. So from that point of view, this is still a majority first generation segment. 59 percent, we estimated, as the first generation, 21 percent second generation, 17 percent third generation or more. Where do you fall there? Monem?

Monem Salam:
I'm in the very, very low one. Like I'm the youngest guy you can probably find in your survey. No, no, I'm actually first generation. I moved here. Yeah. I'm a millennial. No, no, actually, to be honest with you, to full disclosure, I’m a Gen X, but I moved here when I was nine years old. So, you know, when my kids were born here, but I was actually born in Pakistan. Correct. Correct. Yeah.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Okay, so you're still technically considered first generation, right? So your kids would be second generation. Interestingly, it's a very important aspect of how this space is driving savings and financial habits. There's a distinction there, right, of the habits. But let me just kind of point out that comparatively, the American Muslim population versus Canada. In Canada, you 71 % as first generation. So you're a significant majority that is first generation. Whereas in the US, we have now, I would say, sizable second generation and third. So collectively, you're talking about almost 40%, 41% that is second, third generation. And they're obviously young also, and not just that they're second generation here, but also in terms of their habits as a Gen X or Gen Z or millennial also comes into play. So that's an important thing to kind of factor in. Median age of the American Muslims is younger than the average US median age. So it is a very young population relative to the median. And that plays into decision making.

Monem Salam:
If you're looking at the different age groups, what kind of habits are you seeing amongst them when it comes to saving for retirement or education or even just generally it comes to their money?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
So first of all, question, one of the leading questions we asked them was, what are the various ways they're using financial services? You know, what are they, when it comes to finances or financial services, what is most common? And credit cards, 67.7%. And it's the highest in terms of, and I'll just kind of list out the types of credit cards, number one. Personal loans, general purpose number two. Employers sponsored retirement plans and pension plans number three, 41.5 % said. Digital payment apps, mobile wallets, about 38%, seems like a low adoption of payment wallets. Health insurance, next 37.4%. Financial advisory services, 37%. Basic banking accounts, 35%, which is odd but that's what we have.

Monem Salam:
It's like very significant people don't even bank right that's what it’s saying.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Yeah. Online budgeting, financial management tools, housing loans about 25%, car loans 24.5%, individual retirement accounts, education loans, investment accounts, BNPL services, and decentralized finance 14%. So that's sort of the spec, the usage of what type of services they're using. Now, when it, one of the things that was of interest in terms of determining the finance aside is we were interested to explore passive income that the Muslims have in terms of, know, besides their main income, is there other type of passive income they're generating? And 39 % reported receiving some form of passive income. Interestingly, highest share amongst Generation Z and Millennials.

Monem Salam:
That's because the passive income is coming from their parents. I'm just kidding Just kidding. No, no, but that's that's an interesting point because what that really means is that they look it could be, know Interest they're earning on the in the bank It could be that they have a condo that they rent out and they get right what what else could be like a passive income?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Right. So we actually asked a second level of that, which is what does it include? It included the highest, it was in the form of dividends and interest from investment income. OK, second is 31.5 % of those who have passive income rental properties. And certificates of deposit was the next big one. So, you know, it really is, especially the rental properties one, there's a lot of possibilities and it just opens to show that a lot of people are investing, besides investing in investment funds, investing in real estate properties, which opens up to, you know, we're seeing a proliferation sort of a pocket of small real estate funds that are coming up between the Muslims who are aggregating and pooling or investing in real estate projects that are targeting Muslim from a Sharia compliant Islamic structuring point of view. So that is very interesting. And, you know, this is the highest among the younger generation.

Monem Salam:
It's also interesting that I found that like, you know, that's a, it's a fairly significant number of people that are deriving it from, uh, um, know, passive income. And then from that, if you look at the three, you know, the interest part and the CDs part, both of those, technically, you look at it on a surface would say that that would, that would be, uh, you know, uh, uh, just conventional interest, not all the real estate could or could not be, but it kind of speaks to the fact that, you know, majority of, of the people actually are not involved with some type of Islamic finance or something along those lines, which is normal. I expected that, but it is interesting to of look at it that way.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Yeah, yeah, certainly. So I think this kind of gave us, and again, we didn't do this survey was broad as you know, Monem, it covered all aspects of their behavior from food to finance, spending on education, on all categories, clothing, etc. Charity, even we focus a lot on philanthropy as well, which is, as you know, the American Muslim community is known and I think it's validated by the relative spend on charity and where and how they do on the charity side is what we focused on too. Coming to financial services, we also asked their level of satisfaction with the current financial services and what are they looking for in terms of expectation from financial institutions and the…

Monem Salam:
Sorry, just one thing. were you asking the level of satisfaction in any financial services company or letter of assessment in Muslim led or Muslim catering financial services companies? Any, so it could be from anybody from the largest to the smallest.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Any conventional to Islamic because we were, it wasn't saying it wasn't geared towards only those who doing Islamic financial products. It's asking Muslims, are they happy with their financial services and what areas they need? Within the prioritization of what they're asking for in financial services,

security, trustworthiness and data protection ranked highest, followed by fee term transparency, followed by ethical and social responsibility. While Sharia compliance mattered to 54%, which is I think the fifth or sixth, fifth most important criteria. So Sharia compliance while being important was not like the highest criteria. Again, know, just security, trustworthiness, data protection today in an age of concern of data privacy and all of the tools that are kind of creating further concern about the trustworthiness. think this is something. And then the fee term transparency from a just disclosure and not being surprised in terms of the cost of financing and what it goes with it.

Monem Salam:
So, Rafi, do you think, when it comes to the Sharia compliance part of it, do you see that more of as a people like, don't care, or more of a I don't know?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
The Sharia compliance part, think from the survey, can't say which. But I think there is another question in which, and I have to find that question, but when we asked Muslims about their concern about halal food, a significant, significant majority will eat halal and the definition of halal is a little bit broad from a food point of view. But when it comes to finance, the Sharia compliance is not as high. And I don't have the number in front of me, but it was almost flipped, 70, 80%. And we know if credit cards are the number one financial service everybody's using, we know we don't have credit card Sharia compliance services. So majority are dealing in interest-based financial tools already. So yeah, I don't know if that, and we don't know how much has that moved because we did baseline it in our previous survey.

Monem Salam:
Sure. And then the other part of it, it's interesting that the 401(k) part of it came up number three as well, or it was number two, one of those things, as would be obvious, pretty much every employer has it, that they offer it. There are states now that are actually requiring it, right? So definitely as that begins to happen, it's gonna begin to move up. that kind of makes sense that that would be the case.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Yeah. Now, the other thing I think related to finance, financial services is when we ask them in terms of unmet needs within financial services versus satisfaction, like their needs and overall asking them about their unmet needs, the highest unmet need was in housing and finance. Housing finance, house financing was the highest invest need. Investments was number two, followed by personal insurance and pensions, medical, car financing, and then education. Charity was the, you know, they felt like when it comes to charitable, you know, funding options, avenues, I think that's the most satisfied, but the highest were housing, investments, personal insurance, and pensions, medical, car financing and education in that order. So I guess there's still a lot of work cut out for Amana.

Monem Salam:
That's true. And for all of the other ones too, because the idea is that again, yeah, because, especially when it comes to housing, you know, it's also a matter of like, how much can you how much was a pipeline of funds that are flowing through as well. It's not only about what we can do. so it's really interesting because one part of the housing is the people who are taking the money in. But the other part is where do you get the money from? And that has to be the constant supply. It's going to be capped by the number of people that are willing to invest there, that is something that as an investor, people can look at and say, well, this could be a market opportunity for me to take a look at.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Absolutely. And with a lot of the other options that are also emerging, it just shows that there's still such a big knee gap and opportunity to be served well and served. And I think, with all these fintechs that are also coming up, they're recognizing and realizing that there's a much bigger demand than their ability to supply or service. And I think that that remains to be a strong case today.

Monem Salam:
Yeah, I I do know I can tell you from my perspective, just thinking about it, that when you look at the number one, which is data privacy, trust and that type of thing, I do find that as more and more upstart financial companies come into being, right, it's not that you basically transfer all of your money there. You basically start to doing it a little drips at a time, right? Because we want to be able to test it out. know, majority of the people that are out there, if they've heard of XYZ company, they'll probably put maybe 10 % of assets there and the rest of it will be conventional. then slowly over time, probably we'll begin to do that as they become more comfortable with the transparency and data protection and stuff.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
That makes sense exactly. And I think that the trust part for the startup Islamic or Sharia compliant solutions, trust becomes even more important because they're not part of the trusted platforms. And so that has to be established as a critical consideration.

Monem Salam:
Yeah, that's so true. I know we're coming towards the end of it. just I would have one one last question that I wanted to ask. So relative to let's supposing, you know, other other Muslim countries, for example, you know, from all the way from Turkey to Saudi to Malaysia, right? You've seen you've done these surveys often you do other ones as well around the country. How do you see the state of Muslim American Muslims when it comes to their savings investments anything if you can answer that question I'm not sure if you would be able to, but…

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Yeah, I, know, as you know, the other countries are so diverse. And let's start with, you know, the closer, you know, the neighbors, so to say, to the US, besides Canada, America's, the UK or France or Germany, which is sort the other big pocket of the Muslim minority markets. There's a lot of similar challenges and similar gaps, similar needs that we see in the American Muslim market. One of the things comparatively, Monem, what I can say is in a place like UK, because you have much stronger government support, regulatory support, that we're seeing a lot more solutions being offered in UK to the Muslim market. The sophistication of the availability relative to the size of the population, is, know, much less than the American Muslim population is quite high. And so everything from Syria compliant college loans, are education financing mechanisms and home financing and others. I think there is relative to US because of the government support, which is relatively higher there, you see a lot more availability of options. But in terms of sophistication of portfolio allocation and management between Sharia Compliant and Pure Funds and others, we don't have that insight.

Monem Salam:
And then if you compare it to, or you have it for like Turkey or for other places, things like that, relative to.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Yeah, Turkey, Turkey is very interesting. you know, their Islamic or Sharia compliance is actually not even you can't even say that word there. It's participation financing. And there's still I don't have the exact numbers, but the percentage of participation financing versus conventional is still very low. Given the fact that it is a you know, it's a Muslim majority country. You know, I'm just going to roughly say that maybe 10 % or less is the Islamic relative penetration in Turkey. So it is a very small utility. And as you know, even within many of the Muslim majority countries, the penetration is still, in Indonesia, for example, it's still hovering at, I think 16, 17 % or quite low, and they're struggling to grow. So there's significant challenges. You they're structural, they're perceptual challenges. And of course, funding and sources of funding become at a macro level still also potentially an issue.

Monem Salam:
That's true. That's a really good point. I think one of the things we do have when it comes to funding is, you know, we have a little bit more wealth here in the US per capita probably, and not in the Muslim community, but also people that are willing to fund certain projects when it comes to Islamic finance and other things also.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
One maybe one anecdote that's interesting that we're kind of scratching our head and maybe an indication for the financial services community. Think about is the influence of Islamic values on financial and product financial products and services is less for the second and third generation than the first generation. Does that make sense to you?

Monem Salam:
So let's, let's kind of break that down. So what basically that that's saying is that, a second generation, third generation would rather choose is another way to put it, would rather choose a conventional product over an Islamic one. Whereas the first generation would be the other way around. Correct. Yeah. I think, I think that is, I, I, I'm not surprised by that. All right. And here's the reason why. I mean, I think that for all, for a lot of in the first generation of Muslims that came here, they still pretty much, if you want to call it quote unquote, grew up around the mosque. Right? Whereas the second, third generation, that is not the case. They have other avenues to do that, other avenues to learn those type of things. And so, know, anecdotally, this is not obviously, but there is this idea that unless your parents are really kind of emphasizing to you that they should be doing this in Islamic way, as far as your finances are concerned, it's one of those areas that slips away.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
That's right. And I think both for the Islamic financial services providers as well as concerned parents, you know, this is something to I don't think this comes, you know, in sort of educating the next generation on Islamic values and so forth. The importance of finances being aligned is something that, as you're saying, slips. And the survey shows that. And we were kind of surprised across the board.

Monem Salam:
Yeah, it's interesting because you know when you go to a when you're sitting in the overhearing conversation with your parents is like, you know, oh, what's a good halal restaurant that's in town or what's you know, everything a whole lot everything does. However, the topic of financial doesn't come up a lot, unless the parents are the ones that sit down with people and actually talk about it. So there is that education transfer that is, it's not, you know, from the from the from listening to the room. It's actually you really do have to sit down and talk to your kids about about Islamic finance and stuff like that.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
That's right.

Monem Salam:
That's interesting. Rafi, thank you so much for taking the time. Really valuable information. Can anybody pick up a copy? Tell us more about the survey that we've been talking about for the last 45 minutes. Where can people pick it up?

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Sure. yeah, so think you can go, not I think you can go to the dinarstandard.com and we would have a link to download the executive summary, which would have pretty much most of the points we discussed. And then there's a fuller version, which the Thrive organizers were commissioned, you know, and there's a fee for it that they can also get a link. If there's any questions, I'm happy to, you know, they can find my contact from the website as well and reach out and happy to answer any questions.

Monem Salam:
Yeah, thank you so much for your time.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh: 
Thank you, man. Take care.

Monem Salam:
Thank you for listening to Halal Money Matters. If you like what you hear, please do rate us on the app stores and also leave us a review. It helps other people find us a lot easier.

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