2017: Reflections, The Journey Forward & Your Help | IFG

Since today marks the last day of the calendar year 2017, we thought this would be an appropriate time to pen a short article setting out our journey thus far and what we see for the future of this platform.

This year has been undoubtedly our most productive year for Islamic Finance Guru and we pray that 2018 is even more productive.

We have provided no fewer than 20 articles which have generated numerous views, shares, comments, and direct contact through to us via our Contact page.  We are humbled by the responses we receive and our greatest pleasure is in providing relevant content to you folks at a time where such content is needed by Muslims who are trying to understand a financial world around them which is daunting enough in itself, let alone having to understand it through the prism of an Islamic consciousness and making the right decisions for you and your families.

20 articles might not sound like a prolific amount over a 12-month period: however, we are very conscious that what our readers enjoy is well-researched and detailed pieces, rather than writing for writing’s sake. We both run this website as a labour of love, alongside busy day jobs, family lives, and other commitments – but we wouldn’t do it if we were not passionate about helping our readers to achieve their financial aims in an Islamic manner.

This is why this platform is independent and free of advertising. We feel that this is the best way that we can offer you a neutral and fair analysis.

Reflections

In August 2017, we published an article which stated that we were looking likely hit 40,000 views this year, which is around a 100% increase on 2016. Alhamdulillah, it looks we will surpass this and the 2017 total will actually be around 45,000 views. The number of visitors to this website are of little importance to us as we do not take any advertising revenue – this website is actually a cost to us – but we take great pleasure in increased views because it ultimately means that more and more people are reading our articles and finding them relevant. This fulfils our primary purpose: empowering you to make decisions.

Our most read article is this one so if you’re a regular reader IFG reader and haven’t read that article, please do! All our popular articles are listed on the homepage and at the side of every article for easy access.

A major part of our work on IFG this year was the re-branding and overhaul of the website. We wanted a website that would allow readers a clean and sophisticated experience, which allowed for easy location of content and access to various parts of the website. We hope this has been well received.

We also launched our Consultancy & Advisory service which has allowed us to engage with people in a much more involved way to address their sharia compliance issues. These have been varied in nature but the common theme is that we have greatly enjoyed helping them come to practical solutions to achieve their goals.

The journey forwards

We always want to improve: that means making this platform as relevant as ever, producing content which assists Muslims in making financial decisions, and addressing queries be it a quick question via our Contact page or article comments, or more detailed research through our Consultancy offering.

In the immediate pipeline, we are working hard on a series of articles relating to Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, and the Islamic questions surrounding the whole area. There are various other exciting things we want to work on to make help this platform to achieve its full potential and we look forward to bringing those to you!

Your help

At this point, we must confess an ulterior motive to this article. We want your help and guidance on our journey forward. Mashwara (mutual consultation) is not only just a generally good thing to do, but it is the way of the Prophet (pbuh) and is described as a quality of believers in the Qur’an as well.

We want you to get in touch with – either through the comments or via our Contact page – and tell us what we can do to make this the best possible platform it can be. Tell us about the sort of articles you want us to write, whether you think people would benefit from videos/podcasts etc, thoughts about the website, or literally anything whatsoever.

We want to wrap up by saying a sincere thank you and jazakAllah khair for all your engagement – we are a community platform and are therefore nothing without all of you.

Ws,

Ibrahim & Mohsin