The Quiet Ethics of a Global Economy

A few years ago, I was speaking at a halal food conference in Poznań, Poland. The room was full of Polish food exporters—meat processors, dairy producers, packaging executives—most of whom had come with a single, unsentimental question on their minds: how do we sell more to the Muslim world? They were not there for theology. They were there for trade.

I gave my usual presentation: market size, consumer demographics, sector growth, the structural drivers behind a global ethical economy anchored in Islamic values. The numbers landed, as numbers tend to do. But what I did not expect was what happened afterwards.

Two large men, broad-shouldered and entirely Polish, walked up to me at the side of the stage. Both had tears in their eyes. One of them said, almost apologetically, “We had no idea. We thought this was just another certification. We did not know there was so much spirituality and ethics behind it.”

I have thought about that moment many times since. It captures, more honestly than any chart I have ever drawn, what is actually happening in the global Islamic economy. The data describes a surface; underneath is something the numbers cannot quite reach.

What the Data Does Say

For over a decade, my colleagues at DinarStandard and I have been compiling the State of the Global Islamic Economy (SGIE) Report, now in its eleventh edition. We have tracked, with as much rigour as the available data allows, the size and trajectory of those sectors whose core products and services are structurally affected by Islamic ethics and law.

The picture that emerges is substantial. In 2023, Muslim consumer spending across six real-economy sectors—halal food, modest fashion, Muslim-friendly travel, halal pharmaceuticals, halal cosmetics, and Islamic-values-themed media and recreation—reached US$2.43 trillion. It is projected to reach US$3.36 trillion by 2028. Alongside this consumer marketplace sits a parallel financial ecosystem: Islamic financial assets under management of US$4.93 trillion, growing at a near-9% compound rate. These are two different measures— one a flow of household spending, the other a stock of managed assets—and they should not be added together. But taken side by side, they describe an economic reality that no serious analyst can dismiss as marginal.

Somali model Halima Aden at the Turkish label Imannor’s final show at the Abu Dhabi Modest Fashion Week 2025. © IMAGO / ZUMA Press / Valeria Ferraro

Behind those numbers is a population of more than two billion Muslims, more than a quarter of humanity, projected to reach 2.2 billion by 2030 with an exceptionally young age profile. This is the demographic engine which is further supplemented by a general global ethical consumer trend. But demography alone does not produce an economy with this shape. What produces it is a framework of values—and values are what those two men in Poznań had unexpectedly
collided with.

The Framework Beneath the Marketplace

The Arabic word “halal” means permissible or lawful under Islamic law. It is the most familiar term in this space, and the one most often reduced to a label on a package. But halal is paired in the Qur’anic vocabulary with another word that is less commonly translated and yet does most of the ethical work: tayyib, meaning good, wholesome, pure. Food may be halal in its ingredients, but it is tayyib only if it is also produced with attention to animal welfare, social justice, the wellbeing of the worker, the integrity of the supply chain. The two words travel together for a reason.

This is the simplest way to understand what the Islamic economy is. It is the set of sectors in which the principles derived from the Qur’an—the Muslim holy book understood as the word of God—and the Sunnah—the teachings and example of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him—structurally shape what is produced, how it is produced, and how it is consumed. Five values do most of the anchoring: justice and equity, social responsibility, modesty, moderation, and family life. These are not abstractions in some seminary; they are the operating assumptions of household decisions made every day by hundreds of millions of people across more than 80 countries.

Seven Sectors, Seven Sites of Conscience

Seen through this lens, the seven sectors that the SGIE Report tracks are not really seven industries. They are seven sites where conscience meets commerce.

Halal food ($1.43 trillion in 2023, projec-ted to reach $1.94 trillion by 2028) is the most visible. The prohibitions are well known—pork, intoxicants, blood, impro-perly slaughtered meat—but the deeper ethic is tayyib: wholesomeness, humane treatment, fairness to the farmer and the worker. This is why halal increasingly overlaps with organic, sustainable, and ethical consumption movements.

Gaza Cola © IMAGO / Paul-Philipp Braun

Islamic finance ($4.93 trillion in assets) rests on the Qur’anic prohibition of riba, usually translated as interest but more accurately understood as exploitative or unearned gain. The positive principle is risk-sharing, asset-backed financing, and a refusal to monetize debt for its own sake. Many of its instruments—sukuk, mudaraba, musharaka—have attracted non-Muslim clients precisely because they re-anchor finance in real economic activity.

Modest fashion ($327 billion, growing toward $433 billion by 2028) draws on the Qur’anic ethic of haya’—a sense of dignity and modesty that applies to both women and men. What began as a niche has, over the past decade, become a global aesthetic conversation. Sustainable fabrics and ethical production are increasingly inseparable from it.

Istanbul Modest Fashion Week © IMAGO

Muslim-friendly travel ($217 billion) is shaped by the Islamic principle that time is a trust, and leisure should refresh the soul rather than dull it. Family-centred destinations, prayer-accessible hotels, halal kitchens at sea, spiritual retreats from Bosnia to Bali—all reflect a particular theology of rest.

A barista prepares coffee at the Sandaran Coffee in Bandung, Indonesia © IMAGO / Dimas Rachmatsyah

Halal pharmaceuticals ($107 billion) and halal cosmetics ($87 billion) extend the same principle of ingestible and applied purity into medicine and personal care. For a young Muslim woman in Baku or Beirut, opening a capsule to check for gelatin is not a peculiarity. It is conscience at the level of the morning routine.

Media and recreation ($260 billion) is perhaps the most dynamic. From the Turkish historical drama ‘Resurrection: Ertuğrul’ to the children’s series ‘Omar & Hana’ with over two billion views, from Awakening Music to the Yaqeen Institute’s hundreds of millions of minutes of viewed lectures, this is a generation finding its imaginative vocabulary.

Seven sectors. Seven applications of the same underlying intuition: that economic life, like all of life, is answerable to something.

 A Decade of Becoming Visible

When we began this work over a decade ago, the global Islamic economy was a useful concept in search of a public. The transformation since then has been less a matter of growth than of cultural confidence.

Consider what has happened in fashion alone. Nike launched the Pro Hijab in 2017. London Modest Fashion Week and Dubai Modest Fashion Week became annual fixtures. By 2024 and 2025, luxury houses were releasing Ramadan capsule collections, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia and Hello! Fashion were running modest fashion editorials, Saudi Arabia held its first official Fashion Week in Riyadh, and Belgium hosted Modest Clothing Week. Hijab-wearing athletes have stood on Olympic podiums—most famously the American fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, whose bronze medal in Rio carried a quiet weight far beyond sport. British Airways and Malaysian Airlines began offering modest uniform options. None of this required a marketing campaign. It required only that a generation of young Muslim women, particularly in Indonesia, Malaysia, Türkiye, the Gulf, and the West, refused to choose between their faith and their participation in public life.

A Halal restaurant in Seoul, South Korea © Shutterstock

Consider sports more broadly. Khabib Nurmagomedov retired as UFC lightweight champion and inspired millions by openly attributing his composure to his faith and family. Asma Elbadawi led an Adidas global campaign as a hijab-wearing basketball player. The 2022 Qatar World Cup positioned itself unapologetically around Islamic hospitality and values—a moment I wrote about at the time, because it captured something important: that authenticity, confidently expressed, is more powerful than imitation. Qatar did not try to be Europe with sand. It carved out its own contribution.

Consider media. ‘Ertuğrul’ found a global audience on Netflix. ‘Omar & Hana’ taught a generation of Muslim children that Islamic values can be conveyed through animation that delights rather than lectures. MuslimPro reached tens of millions of users. The Yaqeen Institute became a credible online address for serious Islamic scholarship. Muslim content creators on TikTok and Instagram accumulated audiences in the hundreds of millions.

And consider, more recently, the rise of what our most recent report called ethical consumer activism. In the wake of the internationally acknowledged genocide in Gaza beginning in late 2023, our social-media analysis of more than 3,200 Arabic, English, Bahasa, and French posts showed a marked uplift in pro-alternative sentiment across food and beverages, technology, fashion, and cosmetics. Local brands—Malaysia’s ZUS Coffee, Indonesia’s Wardah, regional cola labels from Jordan to Pakistan, Gaza Cola in the UK, Pakistan’s Pakola—were carried forward on a wave of what one might call values-based consumption. Activist apps like Boycat and No Thanks made this a daily habit rather than a campaign. This is not the whole story of the past two years, but it is part of the story, and it tells us something important: this consumer base is not passive. It uses its purchasing decisions as an expression of conscience.

Throughout this period, what has been unfolding is not a market segment maturing. It is a generation finding that its faith, its aesthetic, its ethics, and its consumption can be of a piece.

Halal as a Global Vocabulary

The most remarkable feature of this economy, however, is not its scale or its growth. It is its geography.

Halal certification—the regulatory and ethical infrastructure that translates these values into a global supply chain—now runs through more than 300 recognized certification bodies across the world. The largest exporters of halal products to the 57 member countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation are not, for the most part, Muslim-majority nations. In 2023, China led with US$32.5 billion in exports to OIC countries, followed by India ($28.9 billion), Brazil ($26.9 billion), Russia ($20.6 billion), and the United States ($20.2 billion). Brazil alone has long been the world’s largest exporter of halal poultry. South African beef is returning to Saudi Arabian tables after a two-decade pause. Kobe beef now exports to Saudi Arabia with halal certification. South Korean Hanwoo beef has secured halal certification for Malaysia. Hong Kong’s Islamic body is working to certify more than 500 halal restaurants. Vietnam established a national halal certification authority. The Department of Islamic Development Malaysia recognized new certification bodies from Russia, Brazil, Mongolia, and Uruguay.

What this means, practically, is that an economic vocabulary developed from the Qur’an and the Sunnah is now being spoken—sometimes haltingly, sometimes fluently, but spoken nonetheless—in São Paulo abattoirs, Shandong food processing plants, Polish poultry exporters, Russian cooperatives, and Cape Town feedlots. The values are Muslim. The marketplace is the world.

Nike’s Pro-Hijab wear © NIKE

Nowhere is this more striking than in Thailand. Thailand is a Buddhist-majority country with a Muslim minority of less than 10%. Yet Thailand is among the world’s leading halal food exporters and consistently ranks among the top countries on our Global Islamic Economy Indicator for halal food. The reason is a remarkable institution: the Halal Science Center at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, founded and led for years by Dr Winai Dahlan. Dr Winai and his team built, with quiet persistence, one of the most scientifically rigorous halal certification ecosystems in the world—testing laboratories, traceability systems, training programmes, and global partnerships, all anchored in a Thai Muslim heritage community that has lived in that country for centuries. Their work has positioned Thailand not merely as an exporter but as a global standard-setter.

Stand at the Halal Science Center in Bangkok and then stand in that conference hall in Poznań, and you will see the same economy from two very different angles. In Poznań, non-Muslim executives are discovering what the ethic is. In Bangkok, a Thai Muslim community is teaching the world how to apply it. Both are forms of stewardship. Both are part of how this economy lives in the world.

What This Economy is For

I have spoken at Halal-related conferences in Bangkok, Warsaw, Poznań, São Paulo, Cape Town, Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, Dubai, and a dozen other cities over the past fifteen years—always as the analyst, the outsider with the slides. And in nearly every one of those rooms, I have watched the same quiet moment happen to someone. A non-Muslim executive sits through a presentation expecting a market briefing. Then, somewhere in the middle, they realize that what they had taken to be a niche certification—a checkbox on a packaging line—is actually a moral framework: an ethic of how animals are raised and slaughtered, of how workers are treated, of how money is permitted to circulate, of how families are protected from harm, of how leisure is meant to refresh rather than degrade.

This is, I think, the single most important fact about the global Islamic economy: it is not really an economy—it is an ethic that happens to express itself, among other things, economically.

This is why the trend has proven so resilient. It is why it has crossed every continent. It is why young Muslim consumers in Lagos, Karachi, Birmingham, Jakarta, and Detroit recognize each other across cultures they have never visited. It is why non-Muslim brands like Saffron Road, Iba Cosmetics, IFANCA-certified products on American shelves, and BRF in Brazil have found that the same standards that satisfy a devout Muslim consumer also tend to satisfy an ethically attentive non-Muslim one. The values translate.

Kuala Lumpur’s cityscape © Sohail Nakhooda / ISLAMICA MEDIA

At DinarStandard we have always believed that authenticity, confidently and competently expressed, is the most powerful contribution any community can make to the world. The work we do—in over 30 countries, with governments, multilaterals, corporates, and entrepreneurs—is in service of that conviction. The global Islamic economy, properly understood, is one of the most consequential expressions of it. This is not because it is Muslim, but because it is universal in what it offers: a model of economic life answerable to ethics, accountable to community, and oriented toward the long horizon rather than the next quarter.

The next decade of this trend will determine whether that promise is realized. It will require deeper integration with the Sustainable Development Goals, more honest engagement with the gaps that remain—environmental, gender, governance—and a willingness to be measured by something more demanding than market size. But the foundations are unmistakable: a multi-trillion-dollar marketplace anchored in faith; a global supply chain that speaks a common ethical vocabulary across more than 300 certification bodies; a young generation that no longer experiences a tension between belief and belonging.

The Qur’an offers, near the end of Surah al-Ma’idah, a directive that has stayed with me throughout this work: “O you who believe, stand firmly for justice as witnesses for God, even against yourselves.” It is, among other things, an economic instruction. Justice is not a sector. It is a posture. And when an entire economy begins to take that posture seriously—imperfectly, contested, in motion—the world has reason to pay attention.