r/IslamicFinance

32 F Canadian. How do I invest 50k I need it to be 100 percent halal nothing that’s iffy or in the grey area

I’m currently on a 5‑year fixed term with Gatehouse, ending in February next year. My rate right now is 3.75%. After the fixed term finishes, I expect the rate to increase to around 5.5%–6%.

I have 20 years remaining on the mortgage, and my monthly payments will likely rise to about £2,000 after February. I’m considering whether I should pay off the mortgage completely.

If I keep the money in an Islamic bank, I only earn around 4%, and I would still have to pay 40% tax on the profit plus zakat.

Do you have any advice?

Assalamualaikum
Living in UK. Married. 31. 60k annual income. I do not have any other incomes out of this job. Can someone please advice how I can start something of my own parallel to my work so I don’t depend on this alone. I have heard of stocks, dropshipping etc but knows nothing about it and concern about what is halal haram.

I started seriously thinking about this when my dad became ill and I couldn’t really give much time to him as he’s in India and I was not in a position to leave this job completely. He’s ok now Alhamdulillah but I want to be there when they need me next time.

Really appreciate anyone with sincere advice. I pray Allah make you successful in both the worlds 🙂

I’ve been wanting to invest for a while now but haven’t found been set back because of the dividends because idk if it’s halal or haram?
Are they halal if they come from a halal company? Or is it still considered haram?

Hey everyone. Salaam.

I'm looking to invest or buy something that would bring a return.

Are there any ISAs that are halal? I think you get a 20k tax free allowance with the profit not taxed either. I've done some checking and there are a few but they deal with commodity murahaba which I think is questionable.

If anyone could provide some guidance please?

Thank you!

Salam everyone,

I'm working on a project, an online platform offering interactive courses on Islamic history — starting from the Jahiliyyah (pre-Islamic Arabia) all the way through the Sirah of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and the early Islamic era. The idea is a full year-long curriculum, taught live by qualified instructors (ustadh/ustadha) with real degrees in Islamic sciences, in small cohorts (10–20 students) so people can actually engage and ask questions — not just watch pre-recorded videos.

Format: 4 live sessions per week, 1.5 hours each, over 12 months, with a fixed teacher per cohort so there's continuity and real follow-up.

To be clear: this isn't about profiting off deen. The goal is to make authentic knowledge accessible to the French/english-speaking Muslim diaspora in Europe and Canada,US who often struggle to find serious, structured resources in French and English. But we do need to fairly pay the teachers and the developers maintaining the platform, so it can't be fully free either.

I'm trying to figure out fair, sustainable pricing. Genuinely curious what this community thinks:

What would feel like a fair monthly price for something like this?

Would you prefer monthly or yearly pricing?

What's made you hesitate (if ever) to pay for online Islamic education platforms before?

Any honest feedback — even harsh — is welcome. JazakumAllah khair 🤲

Assalamualaikum,

I hope everyone is doing well.

I have been with my partner for two years, and since around our six-month mark, I have been hoping and asking for an engagement. His parents initially resisted because he was still in university, and they wanted him to graduate and start working first, which I completely understood. He graduated and started working in June, but he currently has approximately $400,000 in debt from medical school.

My dad recently called his dad and said that now that he has graduated and started working, he felt it was a good time for them to formally come and ask for my hand. They agreed and planned to come yesterday.

Last week, our fathers discussed mahr. My dad said he was not asking for any muqaddam or anything else, but only a mo’akh of $500,000. He told his father, “I am so confident in their relationship that we will never even ask for the mo’akh because it will never reach that point, but he needs to have a leg for his daughter to stand on.”

His father immediately rejected this and said that we were asking for too much. His offer was a paid-off house and a small wedding.

My dad said they would think about it.

Yesterday, when they came over, the issue of mahr was brought up again. His father said that they could not give me mahr. He said, “My son is a doctor. If they get divorced, the Canadian government is going to take half of his assets and give them to your daughter, so there is no reason for a mo’akh. I need to protect my son.”

Because of this, they were not open to offering either a muqaddam or mo’akh, and they also did not bring a ring.

Ultimately, the engagement did not go through because his father said he was not willing to negotiate mahr and felt that he was already giving enough by offering a house and paying for a wedding.

My dad’s concern is that his son is currently $400,000 in debt. If, God forbid, something happened within the first year or two of marriage while he was still paying off that debt, I could potentially be left without much financial security. My dad also says that in our family, it has never happened that a daughter was married without a mahr, so he feels strongly that he cannot give his daughter away without one.

For additional context, his family is very wealthy. They have three paid-off houses in Canada, his father is a doctor, his mother works and earns a substantial income, and they also have three paid-off properties in Dubai. My family is also financially comfortable—we have a paid-off house in Dubai and are currently paying off two houses in Canada.

I am genuinely looking for unbiased opinions, because I am having a hard time understanding this situation emotionally.

Is my dad being unreasonable by insisting on a mahr? Is the $500,000 mo’akh an unreasonable request, even if we are not asking for a muqaddam? Or is his family being unreasonable by refusing to offer or negotiate a mahr altogether?

And honestly, one of the things I am struggling with the most is the mindset behind it. I keep thinking: Why are they so concerned about protecting themselves from a divorce when we are not entering this marriage expecting or planning to divorce? Mahr is a requirement in our family and something that the men in my family have always given when getting married. To us, asking for a mo’akh is not an indication that we expect the marriage to fail or that we are planning for divorce. It is simply a form of financial security and a religious/cultural requirement.

I also find myself wondering why my partner is already thinking about what happens if we divorce. I understand that he has significant debt and that his parents want to protect him financially, but emotionally, it is difficult for me to hear that reasoning when I am simply asking for something that has always been considered part of marriage in my family.

I would really appreciate honest and unbiased perspectives. I am not looking for people to automatically take my side. If you think my dad’s request is excessive, please tell me. If you think his family’s refusal is unreasonable, please tell me that too.

I would especially appreciate perspectives from people who understand both the Islamic concept of mahr and how marriage/divorce and financial rights work in Canada, because I want to understand whether I am looking at this emotionally or whether my concerns are actually reasonable.

Assalamualeikum everyone, hope everyone is doing well. I’ve been thinking lately of possibly wanting to move out in the near future and have been looking into sharia compliant loans but haven’t found anything in Belgium till now. How did some of you guys buy your house in a Sharia compliant way and did any of y’all find a solution?

P.S I can’t really ask money to my family because 1. They don’t have any and they’re not muslims (I’m a revert) and they don’t really have the same mentality

Salaam,

I am a Muslim off to uni this September. I’m studying in the Uk where tuition fees is high going up to 9k which is an amount me and my family cannot pay for out of pocket. As I am aware Riba is a major sin, I wanted to ask the Muslims young to uni in the UK for advice on whether or not taking out a student loan to pay for uni would be forbidden, even if I have no other way to pay for uni. Any advice anyone can give me on the matter will be incredibly helpful. Thank you!

The TLTR explanation is:

Private equity = buy, fix, scale, exit.

Halal private equity = do the same thing, but only with permissible businesses and Sharia-compliant financing.

Longer version.

Private equity is basically a business-buying engine. It looks for small or fragmented companies that already have demand, buys them, improves the operations, scales them, and sells later for a bigger profit.

That’s the whole game:

- Buy a good but under-managed business.

- Fix pricing, systems, staffing, and marketing.

- Add more locations or buy similar businesses.

- Grow revenue and margins.

- Exit at a higher valuation.

The reason PE makes so much money is simple: it doesn’t just wait for the market to rise. It creates value inside the business.

Some real stats:

- A study of 10,000+ PE entries and exits globally found that revenue growth drove 54% of value creation on average.

- In the last two years of that research period, revenue growth contributed around 65–70% of value creation.

- Margin expansion contributed 15%.

- Multiple expansion contributed 32%.

- Growing businesses often got 30–50% higher exit multiples.

The controversial part is what this can mean in real life. In sectors like healthcare, critics say PE can raise prices, squeeze staff, and reduce service quality while making the numbers look better on paper. UK reporting has shown heavy PE activity across healthcare-related businesses such as pharmacies, care, diagnostics, and specialist services.

The halal version of this is the same engine, but filtered through Islamic rules:

- Buy only permissible businesses.

- Avoid interest-heavy debt.

- Avoid haram sectors.

- Make money from real operational improvement, not riba or financial tricks.

A real example is Cur8 Capital’s UK pharmacy strategy, which publicly says it acquired 33 pharmacies in 14 months, hit £27 million annualised revenue, and aims to scale to 100+ pharmacies. That is basically halal-style private equity: buy fragmented businesses, improve them, consolidate, and grow.

Building a Shariah algo trading platform for individual Muslims. If you currently trade or invest, I'd love to hear about your frustrations with existing tools. DM me or reply here!

As a muslim i see western millionaires and billionaires enjoying on their yachts in italy france and europe most of them made their wealth thru finance like PE IB etc

But muslims who spend the same vacation as them what did you do to achieve this wealth?

I am a hafiz e quran, and I teach students online, but right now, I am struggling financially. Kindly guide me on how I can increase my income, and if any of you want to learn quran, I will teach you.

Unless I am missing something, there is a hadith saying that both giver and taker of interest is in hellfire. I can understand that taking interest is haram and why. But why Is giving interest haram when it's not our choice? And when it's everywhere too. Can someone explain?

Salaam all, wanting to utilise my ISA allowance- what is the best fund to invest in instead of single stocks? Jazak Allah Khair

Salaam! Been thinking about this for a while and am curious.

Thinking about your actual purchases in the past, has a business being Muslim-owned affected where you’ve chosen to spend?
A) Yes — I’ve gone out of my way to buy Muslim-owned
B) Yes — I’ve chosen Muslim-owned when options were similar
C) Not really — it rarely affects where I buy
D) No — it doesn’t affect my choice

Keen to hear your reasoning.

Assalamu alaikum
I’m in a very desperate situation. We live in America. My husband and I have a 10 month old baby. I stay home and my husband works full time. We share a car that is over 20 years old and has almost 300k on it. That car’s transmission is going out (the torque converter which is thousands to repair). We only have about $2,000 cash saved to put towards a car.

Our dilemma is

We can’t get a car with only $2,000. If we even could find one, it would be an absolute unreliable piece of junk needing repairs and unsafe for our baby. We would basically be throwing that money away.

The cost to repair our current car may be more than we can even afford and will again be throwing money away on an old car which has other issues.

If we try to sell our car to buy another it could take months which risks the transmission going out and it being worth nothing. More importantly we also will have no transportation for my husband to go to work for as long as it would take to sell the car and find a new one, so that’s not even an option or he won’t be working.

There is absolutely no sharia compliant car finance options in our state. I’ve looked far and wide.

Would this be considered a situation where it’s permissible to take finance a car?

And we are looking at older cars that we would be able to pay off in a timely manner that are very reliable for our situation, not a brand new expensive car.

I’m feeling so anxious and afraid because of the verse that says Allah will wage war on those involved in interest but I genuinely don’t know what to do in this situation. If our transmission fails before we figure this out, we will be left with nothing. My husband won’t even be able to work. We don’t live near any public transportation either. We are struggling financially.

If it were permissible would it be better to go through our bank, or finance directly from a car dealer as far as contracts go?

I’m a revert and so I’m also not very knowledgeable when it comes to the find details hoping someone can please help me.

When avoiding riba as a Muslim, what do people expect normal Muslims to do? Like, if you can't buy a house through a mortgage, do you just rent for your entire life? If you can't use a credit card, then where do you put your money? Since you can't even put it into a checking account, at least in America, because banks offer interest, what are people supposed to do?

I know a lot of people I see talking about this, or even some posts I've come across, say that they just want to rent their whole lives in order to avoid riba. But is that truly how someone wants to live their life? Is it really worth it when there are other options, like Islamic mortgages?

And yes, some people say that Islamic mortgages are also haram because, at this point, almost everything in the world is connected to riba somehow. Even some Muslim-majority countries use interest-based systems for certain services.

So what do people actually expect? Are only rich people supposed to be able to buy houses? I don't understand why some people take avoiding riba to such an extreme when there may be other options available that are designed to be Shariah-compliant.

Especially for my generation (I'm 17), what do people expect us to do? 

I was pretty set on building my career in Finance.

But the more roles I research, the more I realize that a lot of finance jobs can involve things that I personally want to stay away from as a practicing Muslim.

Then I found FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis)

And honestly, I loved it

Budgeting. Forecasting. Financial modeling. Variance analysis. Business planning. Helping management make decisions.

And it seemed like the perfect combination of finance + analytical work without getting directly involved in banking

But now I have started looking at actual FP&A job descriptions and I have noticed something that worries me.

Some FP&A roles can also involve things like preparing or reviewing conventional interest-bearing loan documentation or analyzing interest expenses or financing options...Sometimes working with Treasury on debt/financing and supporting conventional borrowing activities

And that's where I'm stuck

As a Muslim, I try to be very careful about what I earn and what I directly participate in.

And right now I am thinking "If the main job is halal, but part of the job requires me to directly work on something haram, what does that mean for the job and income as a whole?"

So now I'm trying to figure out what a realistic career path looks like for someone who wants to work in finance without constantly worrying about crossing a line

I'm also about to move to Germany for a Master's in Finance, so this isn't just a theoretical question for me. I need to make a career decision fairly soon.

And honestly, I'm stuck. :(

So, if you're Muslim and working in finance/accounting in Germany or elsewhere, how have you approached this?

I would really appreciate practical advice from people who have actually been through this.