Epilogue

Dear Reader,

I hope this book has served its purpose to deepen your awareness and understanding of Islamic investing. I would like to share my final thoughts and four pieces of advice that I hope will help you integrate aspects of Islamic investing into your investment agenda for beneficial results.

First: Islamic investing is the same as any other style of investing. More than profit and loss, risk and return, and saving and compounding, investing is about accumulating wealth responsibly. Never lose sight of that fact. Though Islamic investment screening delivers a smaller investment universe of eligible securities, the available selection to choose from and the resulting portfolio are more financially sound and less volatile. At its core, investment should focus on the quality of the constituents in one’s portfolio. Comparable performance can be delivered whether there are few or many. In his foreword for the book, The Warren Buffet Way, Peter S. Lynch revealed that normally more than 75 percent of Berkshire Hathaway’s common stock holdings are represented by only five different securities.1

Second: in the next decade, you will have access to a wider range of investment choices. Unlike our parents and grandparents, we will have many avenues available to enable us to invest responsibly. Time will provide more evidence and investment results to make Islamic investing a compelling alternative. Therefore think about investing for the benefit of the world. “Invest” in the larger sense of the word. Don’t limit your investing based on just performance but invest in the causes that move and have value for you or your organization. If you value peace, avoid investing in companies that manufacture weaponry. If you value true wealth generation, avoid using derivatives for speculation (as opposed to hedging). If you believe in mutuality of risk and reward, let’s move away from usury, the practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest. These choices mean you are already investing responsibly and ethically. Studies are being made to narrow the gap between Islamic investing, Environmental and Social Governance investing (ESGI), and Socially Responsible investing (SRI). It will take time to merge and consolidate these socially and financially ethical investment philosophies in both form and substance to reach widespread acceptance.

Third: if you have invested and accumulated wealth responsibly, whether you believe God had a hand in it or not, spend an equal amount of effort determining how you will distribute the wealth responsibly to improve the world. In 2006, Buffet stunned the world when he announced that he would give his fortune, then valued at USD31 billion, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support initiatives that help the world’s poorest people. He was not interested in wasting additional funds to create his own foundation and charitable infrastructure when a proven one was already in existence; rather he wanted to ensure that the money was optimally spent for the people who needed it the most. With the sharp increase in income and wealth inequality, I encourage you to make an effort and use your wealth to create a new world where monies are productively distributed to help many at the bottom, or even in the middle, to live up to their potential and improve their lives. Collectively, our efforts will serve to mitigate the cultural and political consequences of concentrated wealth. Whether it is your money, time or talent, you will feel enriched.

Fourth: start small. After all, Rome was not built in a day.

NOTE

1. Robert G. Hagstrom, Jr., The Warren Buffet Way, copyright (1994), Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, p. v.