Some Days I Think About Giving Up on Islamic Finance
I need to remind myself why I am here.
I came into Islamic finance because I believed it could be better than what I already had. A better way of understanding money, a way of sharing risk instead of dumping on whoever is weakest, and what I earn stays tied to something real.
That belief was the whole reason.
But sometimes I spent watching or hearing the field look exactly like the thing I was trying to leave.
I know the feeling too well.
Someone tells me the market will never accept the version I am striving for, that it costs too much and moves too slowly, that people just want the familiar number.
Some days I understand why people give up on it. The regulator is working carefully, often inside a model the whole world built first, and change there is slow for real reasons.
The market rewards whatever looks normal and punishes whatever doesn't.
I stand between those two and the easy move is right there: match everyone else, stop carrying a belief nobody is paying me to hold.
But that belief is the actual thing. If I take it out, there is no Islamic finance left in my hands.
So I keep coming back to one line and I'm going to hold it. I cannot fix the whole system, and I was never asked to. My responsibility is the part my own hands can reach.
Maybe that's one standard I write more honestly than it had to be. Maybe it's my effort where I say the uncomfortable true thing instead of the comfortable one (see this year IFSB stability report Islamic insurance section).
That is not small I believe.
So I'm going to do it fully. Give everything I have to my role, and keep my integrity at the edge of it. I can work this hard without bowing my head. I can lose an argument without losing myself.
Islamic finance does not need everyone. It needs people who won't let it quietly become ordinary. Some days I push hard enough to move a mountain. On the rainy days I just try to remember why I was given the chance to stand here at all.
The work is worth it either way.
#IslamicFinance #FinFormed #IslamicEconomy #IslamicBanking
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