- From Shariah Education to Islamic Finance Practice
Your academic background is in Shariah and Judiciary, which you’ve applied across both banking and takaful sectors. How did you make the transition from studying Shariah to applying it in financial institutions? What was the most surprising aspect of that transition?
Answer: The transition began the moment I joined my first Islamic bank in 2009 as a Shariah Executive. What surprised me most was discovering exactly how much of what I studied for my B.A. (Hons) in Shariah and Judiciary at USIM actually carried over into practice – and how much didn’t. The technical grounding (usul fiqh, fiqh muamalat, the contract structures) transferred directly; that’s the hard skill, and it gave me a running start. What the classroom couldn’t teach was the soft and social side – reading a business unit’s appetite for risk, negotiating a Shariah position with bankers who think in commercial terms, sitting across from scholars and translating between two very different vocabularies. That only comes from years on the job.
- Banking vs. Takaful: Distinct Compliance Challenges
You have extensive experience in both Islamic banking and takaful. While both are rooted in Shariah, their operational frameworks are quite different. What are the most significant compliance differences between the two sectors? Which sector presents greater challenges from a Shariah audit perspective?
Answer: The compliance differences are significant because banking and takaful are fundamentally different business models. In banking, I’ve worked across retail, SME, corporate finance, investment banking, treasury and trade finance – each with its own products, risk profile and regulatory touchpoints – and at some of the larger banks I went on to work at, that complexity multiplied further with cross-border business, including an overseas and offshore Islamic banking portfolio. Takaful, by comparison – my years at a takaful operator covered both general and family takaful – has a narrower but deeper set of issues: underwriting, retakaful, surplus distribution, Wakalah fee structures. From a Shariah audit perspective, banking presents the greater challenge simply because the business and operational landscape is so much broader and more layered; there are more products, more channels, and more places for a Shariah issue to surface.
- The Role of a Subject Matter Expert (SME)
You’ve been appointed to the Asian Institute of Insurance (Aii) SME Resource Pool and are an examination author. What does it take to become a recognized SME in this field? How do you stay current with evolving Shariah standards and industry practices?
Answer: It took what I expected to be a difficult process, but it turned out to be a fairly simple and straightforward one – you apply, and Aii then puts you through their own evaluation and validation before deciding whether to bring you onto the SME Resource Pool. What they’re really assessing is whether your practical experience and track record hold up, not just your paper qualifications. Staying current is mostly a discipline of keeping up with new Shariah regulatory requirements as they’re issued – BNM’s policy documents in particular – and paying close attention to how transition periods and implementation timelines are being interpreted across the industry, since that’s usually where the real work is.
- Shariah Audit vs. Shariah Advisory
Your expertise spans both Shariah audit/assurance and Shariah advisory/research. How do you view the relationship between these two functions? Can someone excel at both, or do they require fundamentally different mindsets?
Answer: The relationship works two ways: Shariah audit checks the internal controls of the Shariah advisory function itself, and separately, audit engagements often need Shariah advice from advisory on issues surfaced during other audits, or need advisory to set out the applicable Shariah requirements for a particular audit scope. The relationship stays strictly formal, professional and independent from one to another – Shariah advisory sits as the 2nd line of defence, Shariah audit as the 3rd. Can someone excel at both? Yes – it is a skill set that is acquired and developed over time, not something you are born into. But the mindsets are genuinely different: Shariah audit relies solely on established Shariah requirements and tests compliance against them, while Shariah advisory has the opportunity to research in depth in scholarly books and references in coming out with Shariah research papers.
- The Malaysian Regulatory Landscape
Malaysia is one of the most developed Islamic finance markets, with Bank Negara Malaysia’s Shariah Standards being highly influential. From your experience, what are the most challenging regulatory requirements for institutions to comply with? Where do you most frequently see gaps?
Answer: The most challenging requirements are usually the ones with a transition period built in – where an Islamic financial institution has to comply with one set of Shariah requirements before the effective date and a different, often stricter, set after it. Managing that changeover cleanly requires genuinely robust internal controls, because it is easy for a gap to open up in the handover. On where I most frequently see gaps, it is in capacity building at the frontline – to what extent frontliners are able to convey Islamic finance fundamentals to a client in plain terms, rather than reciting Arabic contract names the client does not understand. I saw this repeatedly while designing frontliner training across different banks I’ve worked at – the technical requirement can be well documented and still fail in practice if the person across the counter cannot explain it in terms the client understands.
- Training and Capability Building
As an HRDC-accredited trainer, you’re involved in building the next generation of Islamic finance professionals. What is the most common knowledge gap you observe among practitioners? How do you design training to address it?
Answer: The most common gap is the ability to genuinely appreciate a Shariah structure on its own terms and compare it meaningfully against its conventional counterpart, rather than stopping at a surface-level analogy. To design training that closes that gap, the trainer must first understand the conventional structure inside out, then build the session in layman’s terms, stripping the complex Shariah terminology down to something a non-Shariah practitioner can actually use on the job. Start from what the audience already knows commercially, then bridge across.
- Product Structuring and Practical Challenges
You have experience in structuring products like Sukuk, Tawarruq, and Wakalah. What is the most common misunderstanding among practitioners when structuring these products? What practical challenges do you frequently encounter?
Answer: The most common misunderstanding is that practitioners assume a Shariah-compliant product behaves and carries the same risk profile as its conventional counterpart simply because the commercial outcome looks similar – a Tawarruq facility gets treated in conversation like a straightforward loan, a Sukuk like a bond, when the underlying contracts, ownership and risk allocation are genuinely different. The practical challenge that follows is getting operational and business teams to apply the Shariah structure precisely as documented rather than defaulting to conventional habits – for example ensuring the sequencing of a Tawarruq sale-and-purchase is actually followed, or that a Wakalah appointment is properly evidenced, rather than treating the paperwork as a formality layered on top of what is, in their minds, still a conventional transaction.
- Islamic vs. Conventional from a Shariah Perspective
You’ve worked across retail banking, SME banking, corporate finance, investment banking, treasury, and trade finance. From a Shariah compliance standpoint, which of these areas presents the greatest risk of non-compliance, and why?
Answer: The greatest risk sits in the retail sector. The regulatory requirements there are both robust and diverse – spanning personal financing, deposits, bancatakaful, new account opening, even deceased account handling – and retail is also the highest-volume, highest-touch part of the business, so there is simply more surface area for something to go wrong. And when non-compliance does happen in retail, the damage isn’t only regulatory – it erodes customer trust directly, because the customer is the one holding the product and the one who finds out first.
- Arabic-English Shariah Translation
Your profile highlights expertise in Arabic-English Shariah translation. How does this skill enhance your compliance and advisory work? Why is linguistic precision so critical in Shariah compliance?
Answer: The translation work enhances both compliance and advisory work because a Shariah resolution has to be translated accurately before it can become an established Shariah requirement that operations, product and audit teams can actually apply – get the translation wrong and you’ve built the wrong requirement into the framework. Linguistic precision is critical because Shariah sources are still predominantly Arabic, and a single mistranslated term can shift the meaning of a ruling.
- Advice for Aspiring Shariah Compliance Specialists
You hold multiple prestigious certifications (CRC, CBA, CPSA) and are an ASAS Fellow. For someone starting their career in Shariah compliance today, what advice would you give? What should they prioritize in their professional development to achieve the level of recognition you’ve attained?
Answer: Start small. You can start from a non-Shariah position and learn the banking operation inside out as a practitioner – from teller, branch operations, to credit, treasury and trade finance, and finally to Shariah. That is one route to becoming a well rounded Shariah officer who knows the operation from a first-person account perspective. The other way is the normal route – start at Shariah executive level and accumulate experience by exploring different aspects of the banking business: retail, SME/commercial, credit, trade finance, and treasury/capital markets/investment. Either way, prioritise your area of strength. And on the certifications specifically – CRC, CBA, CPSA in my case – don’t collect them for their own sake. I only pursued each one once it mapped onto work I was already doing day to day, and that is what made them count toward real recognition rather than just another line on a CV.