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My April column for the magazine "Islamic Finance News" fulfilled my promise to review the report “From faith penalty to financial fairness - Unlocking the potential of British Islamic home finance” from the organisation Offa.

I focused on Offa's reliance upon a survey of Muslims that seemed designed to get the predetermined answers that the survey conductors wanted. I regard that as pointless.

You can read it below.

Surveying people to get the answers you want

As promised in my 4 March 2026 column, I want to review Offa’s report: “From faith penalty to financial fairness - Unlocking the potential of British Islamic home finance.” I recommend downloading and reading it.

Since 2007, having to react to “shock horror” findings about British Muslims in surveys commissioned by right-wing think tanks has made me very sensitive to biased polling. High quality polling organisations try hard to ask fair questions which reveal genuine information, because it is so easy to ask questions which provide the responses you are looking for.

Offa provides Islamic property finance. Accordingly, before opening it, I could guess that their report would find that most Muslims, and a reasonable number of non-Muslims, want it.

The report draws on two UK-wide national surveys:

• 1,000 Muslim adults surveyed by Muslim Census (August-September 2025)
• 2,000 non-Muslim adults surveyed by OnePoll (July 2025).

Surveying Britain’s 93.5% (per the 2021 census) of non-Muslims is relatively easy, and OnePoll is a large, well resourced market research organisation with a big consumer panel.

Surveying the 6.5% of Britons who are Muslims is quite hard. The small numbers make it hard to find representative samples balanced by age, education, sex, income, ethnic origin, even before considering religious subdivisions such as Sunni and Shia. Muslim Census is a small organisation conducting (inherently self-selecting) surveys across social media channels. Their website gives no information about how they assess the representativeness of responses.

When you ask Muslims the question “How important is it to you that your financial products align with your ethical or religious beliefs?” it is no surprise that 94.2% say that it is either “very important or somewhat important.” It is the type of question where people will give you the answer they feel they are expected to give. 

That is why list experiments, such as the one summarised in my 2 August 2023 article “Evidence of Pakistani Muslims’ real usage of conventional finance” are so important if you are want objective information not biased by people giving the “socially correct” answer.

Looking more closely at the report, 39.8% of British Muslims have used a conventional mortgage. Of these, when asked “How do you feel about having a conventional mortgage rather than a Sharia-compliant one?” 49.4%, which means 19.6% of British Muslims said: “It is not an issue for me.” However, these are the same people where only 5.8% didn’t answer “very important or somewhat important” to the question in the previous paragraph!

Despite the many methodological failings, the Offa report does contain some interesting information about the challenges customers face when dealing with Islamic property finance providers, such as long decision times, excessive paperwork, poor customer service, lack of transparency, and of course high costs.

I explained in my 8 March 2017 column “The relative costs of conventional and Islamic mortgages” why Islamic home finance in the UK costs more than conventional mortgages. I suspect that UK Islamic providers are not being frank with their customers that such higher costs are inevitable.

Mohammed Amin is an Islamic finance consultant and former tax partner at PwC in the UK.