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Monem Salam’s life began in motion.
Born in Pakistan, he spent his early childhood in Malta, where his father worked as a commercial pilot. The experience left him with a love of travel and a deep curiosity about how people lived across cultures.
At nine, he moved to Houston, Texas. When his father took a job in Saudi Arabia, Monem spent his high school years with his grandparents, learning early to be self-reliant, to adapt, and to navigate new environments without a ready-made community.
He was also learning what it meant to stand out.
In high school, he was one of only a few Muslims. He found his place as a skater, spending afternoons with non-Muslim friends.
He didn’t preach, but his quiet discipline — his refusal to eat pork, his commitment to prayer — left a mark.
Years later, two of those friends, who had since embraced Islam, reached out.
His example, they told him, had made Islam feel familiar when they encountered it later.
At the University of Texas at Austin, he found a new stage for this growing sense of identity.
Intrigued by Middle East politics, he majored in political science and economics, part curiosity, part self-awareness.
In high school, whenever something happened in the Muslim world, teachers turned to him as the “resident expert,” even when the events had nothing to do with his background.
It pushed him to read, think, and engage.
On campus, the Muslim Student Association was barely alive.
A handful of students “kind of just bumped into each other,” revived it, and began to organize. They ran for student government.
Monem narrowly lost his bid for the presidency, but five other Muslims from their slate won seats. “We had really good access to funding,” he recalls, which allowed them to host events the campus had never seen, from Islamic “concerts” to a moving panel titled “Why I Became Muslim.”
He was becoming a leader, an activist, an organizer.
His path seemed set.
But two radically different job offers were about to pull his life in an unexpected direction.
* * *
After graduation, Monem faced a choice.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations offered him a job as a union organizer, a natural extension of his activism.
At the same time, a small Wall Street firm offered him an internship in finance.
His father gave him pragmatic advice: “Try the Wall Street one. If you don’t like it, you can always go back.”
He chose Wall Street. He never looked back.
Two years later, a Dallas startup attempting something novel— Islamic investing — recruited him.
He moved and, for the next four years, found himself at the forefront of a nascent industry, sitting with scholars and explaining the basics of stocks and options.
He realized that to build this new space, he would first have to educate it.
But the travel wore him down, especially with a young family.
He moved to Morgan Stanley, with one nonnegotiable condition: “You cannot tell me what to sell. I’m only going to do things for the Muslim community.”
In the heady days of the 1999 tech boom, the firm agreed.
When the bubble burst and a new manager demanded that he push Morgan Stanley products, Monem didn’t hesitate.
He left within two months, again searching for a place that would let him serve his community on his own terms.
* * *
He found it in a small, relatively unknown firm in Bellingham, Washington: Saturna Capital.
The company managed the Amana Mutual Funds, which then held a modest $40 million in assets. Monem saw potential. He called the CEO, who flew him up for a meeting. A partnership began.
For the next eight years, he packed a suitcase and traveled the country.
His weekends became a blur of airports and masjids. He would fly out Thursday night, give a khutbah on Friday, hold an evening program, teach on Saturday, appear at another event Sunday morning, then fly home.
He visited nearly 800 masjids, patiently educating community after community on Islamic investing.
The grind paid off.
By 2007, the Amana Funds had grown from $40 million to $1 billion.
After the 2008 financial crisis, when many investors sought the safety of Saturna’s value-oriented, ethical approach, assets swelled to $3.5 billion.
He had put halal investing on the map.
But he was still building.
* * *
In 2012, Saturna sent him to Malaysia to expand the company’s international footprint. He and his family moved, and he started from scratch.
By the time he left in late 2018, he had grown the office from $1 million to more than $500 million in institutional assets.
Back in the U.S., he stepped into his current role as a portfolio manager for the Amana Funds.
He had gone from a traveling educator to a steward of the community’s wealth.
From this vantage point, he sees the intersection of wealth, power, and faith with unusual clarity.
A new generation of Muslim professionals is facing the same crossroads he once did: the lure of a high-paying, haram-adjacent job versus the harder, principled path.
He understands the pressures. He also understands the stakes.
What he learned over two decades of traveling and teaching is something he now states plainly: wealth is not just personal security; it is social and political power.
“Wealth is the thing that actually drives everything in this world,” he says. “In order for us as Muslims to be able to set the agenda…we have to be at the table. And the only way you get to the table is if you have the money, or you know how to get the money.”
He points to history. Zakat presumes Muslims have wealth to give. Endowments sustained the Muslim world through eras of crisis and abundance.
And during the Makkah boycott, it was the wealth of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) that carried the early believers.
“We are not a people who say wealth should be shunned,” he says. Wealth is rizq from Allah; the question is how it’s earned and how it’s used.
He rejects the defeatist narrative he sometimes hears about the Muslim community.
“We’ve come a long way,” he says.
He notes the thousands of masjids and Islamic schools built with cash, often while families were still sending money back home, as evidence of discipline and quiet strength.
“It’ll take time,” he says. “But we are on the right path.”
Still, he sees a gap between the community’s current strength and its future potential.
A new era of influence is within reach, but too many hesitate to embrace the tool that could unlock it: purposeful, halal, long-term wealth-building.
The question he keeps returning to is simple: If we don’t build this wealth ourselves, who will fund the institutions, the leaders, and the future we want to see?
* * *
Today, Monem Salam serves as a portfolio manager responsible for stewarding the wealth of the community he has spent his life educating.
But his leadership philosophy was shaped not just in boardrooms; it emerged from a series of audacious, personal challenges to the status quo.
“I don’t like people telling me that you can’t do anything,” he says. “If you tell me you can’t do anything, I want to prove to you that you can.”
In the early 2000s, when Muslims often lamented how impossible it was to enter media, Monem noticed a sign in the Bellingham airport: “Come learn how to fly.”
An idea sparked. His non-Muslim friends encouraged him. His Muslim friends panicked: “Why do you want to go on the no-fly list?”
His first idea was a documentary about getting on and off the no-fly list. A producer at PBS’s POV laughed at the pitch.
“Most people do documentaries about getting out of jail,” she told him, “and you want to do a documentary about getting into jail.”
He made the film anyway.
“On a Wing and a Prayer: An American Muslim Learns to Fly” aired nationally on PBS in 2008.
This act of audacity wasn’t random; it was on a list.
In 1999, while writing about goal-setting, he realized he didn’t have a bucket list for his own life.
He sat down and wrote fifty things he wanted to do before he died. Among them: make a film, write a book, manage a billion dollars.
Years later, he published “A Muslim’s Guide to Investing and Personal Finance.” A few years after that, he was managing more than a billion dollars in assets.
The list still exists. The easy items are crossed off; the harder ones remain.
This practice of writing down goals undergirds his advice to young professionals. Start with the end in mind. But he is clear that discipline alone is insufficient.
The other half is tawakkul.
"Know that your rizq is your rizq," he says. "You're not going to earn a dime more than what has been guaranteed. But that doesn't mean you won’t try."
If not you, then who? If not now, then when?
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