3. “SPEND WITH MODERATION, NOT EXTREMES."

Islam draws a straight line between two extremes and asks us to walk down the middle: neither miserliness nor extravagance.

This principle has a very specific resonance in Bangladesh, where two opposite financial cultures can even coexist in the same family. There's the extreme of hoarding where a person keeps gold in a locker for decades, never invests with a risk-sharing mindset, and keeps it as a backup "just in case". And then there's the extreme of overspending where budgets spiral well beyond what families can afford, often financed through high-interest informal loans, just to keep up with social expectations.

Wedding season is probably our culture's biggest test of this principle. The Prophet ﷺ said, "Eat, drink, give in charity, and wear nice clothing, but without pride and extravagance." A wedding can be beautiful and joyful without becoming a debt trap that the bride or groom's family spends the next three years repaying. Moderation here doesn't mean cheap; it means proportionate to what you actually have.

4. “WEALTH IS A TEST, NOT A TROPHY."

There's a quiet but persistent theological myth that shows up across cultures, including ours: that wealth is a sign of Allah's favor, and that poverty is a sign of His displeasure. The Qur'an directly corrects this.

The Qur'an then gives us the story of a man given immense wealth who grew arrogant, believed it was purely the result of his own brilliance, and was ultimately destroyed along with everything he had built. Some among his people had envied him, wishing for what he had, until they witnessed what his wealth actually was: a test he failed.

In Bangladesh, we have the tendency to treat wealthy businessmen, garment factory owners, or returning expatriates as automatically more honorable or more blessed. On the other hand, the tendency to view a struggling rickshaw-puller or day laborer as somehow less favored by Allah. Both readings are the exact theological myth the Qur'an warns against. "Indeed, the most honorable of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you" (Qur'an 49:13) — not the wealthiest.

5. “RIZQ ISN’T SOMETHING YOU CHASE, IT’S SOMETHING YOU RECEIVE."

Rizq is sustenance provided by Allah SWT. It's both the means by which we provide for our families and a test of how we respond to having it, or not having it. The Qur'an describes human beings as having an exceptional love for wealth and the Prophet ﷺ warned that this love, left unchecked, can ruin a person the way it ruined nations before us.

In Bangladesh, we relentlessly compare even our happiest moments. Weddings, graduations, Eids, promotions, each needs to have a more grand celebration than those in our surroundings. "Who achieved more than you?" “Why can’t you be like them?” “Don’t I feed you the same food as them? Why aren’t you succeeding like them?” are usual conversations at family gatherings. A father works overtime in our nation to afford a flat in Bashundhara R/A not because he needs it, but because his brother-in-law has one. The principle of rizq doesn't tell us to stop working hard; the Prophet ﷺ himself said seeking lawful wealth is an obligation. It tells us to stop treating the chase itself as the source of our security.

6. “CHASING WORLDLY GAIN BREEDS ANXIETY, CHASING AKHIRAH BREEDS CONTENTMENT.”

One of the most repeated themes in the Prophet's ﷺ guidance on wealth is this paradox: the more obsessively you chase worldly gain as your central goal, the more anxious and unsettled you become. This remains true even if you succeed in achieving what you chased.

This matches something Bangladesh's own financial behavior research keeps finding: financial anxiety isn't strictly correlated with income. Plenty of middle-income earners in Dhaka report chronic money stress, while some lower-income households with strong saving discipline report greater peace of mind. There is an endless cycle that many of us know too well: we work overtime for a promotion, get the promotion, immediately upgrade the flat, immediately feel the EMI pressure, immediately start chasing the next promotion to cover it. Each rung of the ladder resets our anxiety to the same level, just at a higher altitude. The principle here isn't "don't work hard"; rather, it's "don't let dunya be the finish line you're sprinting toward."

7. “IDLE MONEY HAS A BUILT-IN COST. ZAKAT PROVES IT.”

Here's a piece of Islamic financial logic that predates modern inflation theory by over a millennium. Umar ibn al-Khattab advised, "Invest the wealth of orphans so that it will not be eaten away by zakat." The reasoning: if money simply sits there, untouched, year after year, the 2.5% annual zakat obligation alone will erode it, entirely separate from inflation.

Source: https://www.dar-alifta.org/en/fatwa/details/6430/zakat-on-a-minors-property

If you have ৳10,00,000 sitting completely idle, it becomes ৳9,75,000 after zakat in year one. After ten years of doing absolutely nothing with it, it falls under ৳8,00,000, and that's before counting what inflation has done to its real purchasing power in the same period.

In our nation, gold and cash are kept in a locker or under the mattress, year after year, generation after generation, just to be safe. It's one of our most common savings habits, and it's also one of the clearest examples of what Umar ibn al-Khattab was warning us against. Islamic scholars in Bangladesh have also pointed out that public awareness of how to even calculate zakat on modern assets like stocks, mutual funds, SME investments, etc remains very low. Which means many people are either underpaying or simply avoiding the calculation altogether.

8. “WHAT YOU GIVE AWAY IS THE ONLY WEALTH YOU TRULY KEEP.”

This idea sounds backwards at first, and that's exactly the point. The Prophet ﷺ asked his companions a question that still lands hard today:

The logic is that everything we eat gets consumed, everything we wear eventually wears out, but what we give in charity is the only portion that genuinely "remains" for us. It stays invested permanently in our akhirah account.

The zakat board operated by the government's Islamic Foundation has historically reached only a small fraction of those who could benefit, and most zakat in Bangladesh is still distributed informally, where sarees and lungis get handed out before Eid rather than structured, sustained support. This isn't wrong, but research on zakat in Bangladesh has consistently pointed out that this approach rarely breaks the cycle of poverty the way investment-based giving could. The principle here challenges us to think about giving the way we think about investing: not just what feels immediately generous, but what actually compounds for the receiver and for ourselves in the akhirah.

9. “COMPARE DOWNWARD, NOT UPWARD.”

If scarcity is partly driven by comparison, Islam offers a remarkably specific antidote. The solution is exactly the opposite of what social media trains us to do.

Our entire social media feeds are designed to make us feel the exact opposite mentality. Every time we open the apps, we see our friends or relatives on vacations, attending weddings, starting new jobs, buying new cars or phones, showing off new home decors or any such happy moments in their lives. This makes some of us jealous and insecure about where we are in our own lives. We start turning a blind eye to our own blessings and forget all the things Allah has granted us. We start wishing for what others have, and it is like an endless loop. But the Prophet's ﷺ advice gives us a practical, personal tool to manage the emotional toll of that comparison. It is to deliberately look at who has less, not who has more, and let gratitude take the place comparison was occupying.

10. “BARAKAH IS THE REAL RETURN ON INVESTMENT.”

We end where the Yaqeen paper ends, with barakah. Barakah is the divine blessing that makes wealth more productive, efficient, and valuable than its raw number would suggest. This explains something every Bangladeshi has witnessed firsthand: two households with the exact same income, where one always seems to have enough and the other is constantly short, despite spending less.

Barakah isn't only about quantity. It's about quality and impact. A modest income that fully covers a family's needs, contentment with what one has, and wealth that genuinely benefits others rather than isolating its owner.

For example, the shopkeepers who build their business on honest weights and fair dealings, have their customers return for decades, and their businesses survive downturns that take out flashier competitors. It's the difference many people sense between a business built on transparency and trust, and one built on deception, even when both might show similar profit margins on paper. At biniyog.io, this is precisely why our due diligence process exists. Our goal is not to simply manage risk, but to protect the very thing: honesty in the transaction that the Prophet ﷺ tied directly to barakah.