Tie the Camel First: 10 Muslim Billionaires Who Took the Sunnah of Effort Seriously

There is a version of the Muslim relationship with money that says wealth is suspicious, ambition is worldly, and the right posture is acceptance of whatever comes. It is a version reinforced by cultural phrases passed down through generations — the kind that sound humble enough to go unquestioned.

But there is another version, one that the Islamic tradition has always held: that effort is ibadah, that stewardship is a responsibility, and that building something of value with your own hands is not a distraction from faith but an expression of it.

The ten people on this list chose the second version. Not because they were born into the right families or the right countries — they were not. They came from cattle markets and construction sites, from corner shops and crumbling factories, from provincial towns and refugee-adjacent beginnings where the infrastructure for success barely existed. What they built, they built from scratch, with their own capital, through their own decisions, over years and decades of compounding effort.

They span the USA, the UAE, France, Algeria, the UK, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sudan, Syria, and Turkey. They are Muslim. And every dollar between them was made entirely through their own hands.

1. Hamdi Ulukaya — USA (born Turkey) | ~$13.5 billion

Hamdi Ulukaya grew up in a Kurdish family in eastern Turkey where his parents made cheese and yogurt the traditional way. He came to America in the early 1990s to study English, and in 2005 noticed a classified advertisement for a defunct Kraft yogurt factory in upstate New York being sold off for parts. As Ulukaya told Inc. magazine in his own words, he threw the flyer in the bin, then retrieved it half an hour later and called the number. He used a Small Business Administration loan to buy the plant, hired five former workers, and spent 18 months perfecting a yogurt recipe before shipping a single unit.

Chobani launched in October 2007 and within five years had become the best-selling Greek yogurt brand in America. He held onto the company through acquisition offers running into the billions, took it public, and today owns the majority of a business valued at over $20 billion. The factory was derelict. The loan was small. The rest was stubbornness and an 18-month refusal to rush a recipe that was not yet right.

2. Shahid "Shad" Khan — USA (born Pakistan) | ~$13.4 billion

Shahid Khan arrived in the United States from Lahore in 1967 at the age of 16 with exactly $500 in his pocket — his family's entire life savings. The dormitories at the University of Illinois were not yet open, so he found a room at the campus YMCA for $2 a night and got a job washing dishes in its kitchen for $1.20 an hour. He graduated with an industrial engineering degree in 1971 and went to work at a small auto parts manufacturer called Flex-N-Gate. He spent years observing how bumpers were made, concluded the process was inefficient, redesigned it from scratch, and eventually bought the company from his own employer.

Today, Flex-N-Gate generates $9 billion in annual revenue and supplies parts to every major car manufacturer in North America. He also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham F.C., but those came later. The foundation was a single factory, a better idea, and the discipline to stay in the same building long enough to see it through.

3. Hussain Sajwani — UAE | ~$10.2 billion

Hussain Sajwani grew up watching his father run a modest trading shop in Dubai's Deira souk. After studying industrial engineering at the University of Washington, he returned to the Gulf and in 1982 founded a catering company that eventually grew into one of the region's largest operations — serving over 150,000 meals a day and landing contracts for Bechtel and the U.S. military during the Gulf War. As he told The National, the catering business was the right training ground but not the destination: the margins were too thin and the ceiling was too low.

In 2002, when the UAE government issued a decree allowing foreigners to buy freehold property in Dubai for the first time, Sajwani moved within weeks and founded DAMAC Properties. He sold aggressively off-plan, moved faster than anyone else in the market, and built one of the Middle East's largest luxury real estate portfolios from a standing start. As he has noted in his own words, the journey began at age 13 in his father's shop in Deira. He did not inherit the shop. He observed it, learned from it, and eventually outgrew it by several billion dollars.

4. Mohed Altrad — France (born Syria) | ~$3.7 billion

Mohed Altrad was born into a Bedouin tribe near Raqqa, Syria, and never knew his exact birth date because no one had recorded it. His mother died when he was young. His father gave him away. He was raised by a grandmother who actively opposed his education and expected him to live as a shepherd. He taught himself to read in secret, and at 17 earned a scholarship from the Syrian government to study in France. He arrived knowing nobody, speaking no French, and with no money.

After a career in technology and a stint at the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, he was approached in 1985 by someone trying to offload a bankrupt scaffolding manufacturer near Montpellier that no one else would touch. As EY noted when naming him World Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015, Altrad bought the failing company and spent the next three decades acquiring every scaffolding and industrial services business he could find across Europe, the Middle East, and Australia.

The Altrad Group today generates over €6 billion in annual revenue and employs 65,000 people across more than 50 countries. He also writes novels. The Bedouin orphan from Raqqa turned out to be both a builder of empires and a teller of stories. The scaffolding business was not a passion. It was a door left open that everyone else had walked past.

5. Sir Anwar Pervez — UK (born Pakistan) | ~$3.5 billion

Sir Anwar Pervez was born into a subsistence farming family in Rawalpindi and moved to England in 1956 at the age of 21 with nothing to his name. He found work as a bus conductor in Bradford, working seven days a week on double shifts for £16 to £18 a week. He saved carefully, and in 1963 opened his first convenience store, "Kashmir," in London's Earl's Court — keeping it open on evenings and weekends when other shops were closed, a small but consequential edge. He spotted that unreliable suppliers were eating into his margins, and rather than accept that as a cost of doing business, he decided to become the supplier himself.

In 1976, using personal savings and contributions from friends, he founded Bestway Wholesale with a single cash-and-carry depot in Acton. As Dawn documented in a profile of his life, when asked what his formula was, his answer never changed: 99% hard work and honesty. Bestway is now the UK's second-largest independent wholesaler, with further interests in pharmacy, cement in Pakistan, and banking through United Bank Limited. He was knighted by the Queen in 1999. The bus conductor's route to a billion ran straight through the Bradford wholesale market, one pallet and one very long shift at a time.

6. Issad Rebrab — Algeria | ~$2.5 billion

Issad Rebrab was born in 1944 in the village of Taguemount-Azouz in Algeria's Kabylie region. His father was not a businessman. He was a militant who spent his years fighting for Algerian independence from France, which meant there was no family capital, no trading network, and no warm handover waiting for his son. Rebrab qualified as an accountant, opened his own practice in 1968, and in 1971 used accumulated savings to buy a 19% stake in Sotecom — a small metallurgical company, his first step into ownership. He spent the 1970s and 1980s building steel and construction supply companies, then lost three factories to terrorist attacks in 1995 during Algeria's civil conflict and was forced to temporarily relocate to France. He returned and in 1998 founded Cevital, which grew into Algeria's largest private conglomerate.

Today Cevital operates one of the world's largest sugar refineries, producing two million tons per year, alongside steel, agribusiness, electronics, and European acquisitions including French appliance maker Brandt. As StartupTipsDaily documented in a profile of his origins, his family were by no means wealthy. What makes his story particularly striking is not just how he started but that he lost almost everything in 1995 and chose to begin again anyway. Most people would not have come back from that. He did, and built something larger the second time.

7. Chairul Tanjung — Indonesia | ~$4.34 billion

Chairul Tanjung was studying dentistry at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta when the Suharto regime shut down his father's magazine company. The family sold their house and cars to cover debt and moved into a small apartment. To pay for his own studies, Tanjung sold photocopied textbooks and printed t-shirts on campus, and later ran a small medical equipment shop out of his boarding room. When he graduated, he had a dental degree, no capital, and no connections. What he did have was the confidence to walk into a bank and make a case. He secured a loan of Rp 150 million from the state Exim Bank and used it to build what would eventually become CT Corp — one of Indonesia's largest and most diversified conglomerates.

He now controls Bank Mega, Trans TV, the Transmart supermarket chain, stakes in Garuda Indonesia and Allo Bank, and the Indonesian franchises for Wendy's and several international fashion brands. As Forbes has noted in profiling him, his advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to stay adaptable — because it is never the strongest or the smartest who succeed but the most willing to change. The dental degree was the credential that got him through the bank's door. The rest he built on terms that had nothing to do with dentistry.

8. Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary — Malaysia | ~$2.2 billion

Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary was born in 1951 in Alor Setar, Kedah, into a family whose roots trace back to Hadhramawt, Yemen. His father ran a small cattle business that was wiped out by a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, leaving the family with nothing. Syed Mokhtar left school before completing his secondary education because the family could not afford his examination fees. He started with RM1,100 in personal savings, applied for a MARA loan to buy lorries, secured a rice trading licence, and began supplying government-linked agencies including FELDA and MARA — driving the lorries himself in the early years. As Wealth and Society documented, he has said that success in business requires no formal education, only determination, discipline, and hard work. That philosophy, held without wavering across five decades, carried him from rice transportation into ports, automotive, defence, and media — through MMC Corporation, DRB-HICOM, Bernas, and Tradewinds Plantations. He holds no university degree.

He is Malaysia's most prominent Bumiputera billionaire, and in 1996 founded the Al-Bukhary Foundation, which has since committed over $500 million globally to education, healthcare, and disaster relief. He still drinks teh tarik at roadside cafes. The man who owns five of Malaysia's major ports has not changed how he takes his tea.

9. Mo Ibrahim — Sudan/UK | ~$1.3 billion

Mo Ibrahim was born in Sudan and came to Britain to study telecommunications engineering, eventually earning a PhD from the University of Birmingham. He spent years working at British Telecom and Cellnet before founding his own consultancy. In 1998, while running that software and consulting firm in London, he observed that every major telecoms company he worked with was deliberately avoiding sub-Saharan Africa. As he recounted in a Harvard Business Review account of the Celtel story, one executive cited Idi Amin as a reason not to invest in Uganda. Amin had been gone for 15 years. Rather than accepting that logic, Ibrahim decided that if the big players would not go, he would.

He founded Celtel with five employees and initial funding from his own consulting firm, raised $300 million in capital over five years, and built mobile networks across 14 African countries — eventually serving over 24 million subscribers. In 2005, he sold the company to Kuwait's Mobile Telecommunications Company for $3.4 billion, one of the largest M&A deals in African history at the time. He subsequently founded the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and the Ibrahim Prize, the world's largest individual award for achievement in African leadership. The thesis was never complicated. He simply believed something was possible that everyone else had decided was not worth the risk.

10. Erman Ilıcak — Turkey | ~$2.9 billion

Erman Ilıcak was born in 1967 in Darende, a small provincial town in Malatya, eastern Turkey. His father was a lawyer, not a businessman, and there was no family capital, no industry connections, and no business infrastructure to inherit. After graduating with a civil engineering degree from Middle East Technical University in 1990, he went to work for ENKA, one of Turkey's largest contractors, spending time on construction sites in Libya and then in Russia. In 1993, at 26 years old, he left that job and founded Rönesans Holding in St. Petersburg with $30,000 of personal savings. He won small contracts first, then larger ones, then compounded relentlessly.

The turning point came in 1998 when a rival company was forced out of Russia by the financial crisis and its entire team of 40 engineers transferred to Rönesans overnight. He absorbed that talent, scaled the operation, and never looked back. Over the next two decades he expanded across 30 countries, acquired major European contractors including Ballast Nedam in the Netherlands and Heitkamp in Germany, and built 12 large hospital complexes across Turkey through public-private partnership structures. Today, Rönesans Holding ranks among the top 50 international contractors globally and employs over 30,000 people. Forbes Turkey has named him the country's richest self-made billionaire. The starting point was $30,000, a civil engineering degree, and the willingness to go somewhere nobody else was looking.

The pattern nobody talks about

Strip away the industries, the continents, and the net worth figures, and these ten stories share the same basic structure. Someone identified a gap that others had dismissed or simply not noticed. They committed time and capital to it with very little cushion if it went wrong. They absorbed setbacks — terrorist attacks, financial crises, deportations, derelict factories — without changing course. And they compounded their effort, quietly, across years and decades, without waiting for the conditions to feel right.

This is not a coincidence, and it is not a personality type exclusive to billionaires. It is the practical expression of something Islam has always taught.

The mindset that says wealth is spiritually dangerous, or that contentment means staying small, or that rezeki will arrive without the rope being tied — is not tawakkul. What tawakkul actually requires is that you do the work first, completely and without shortcuts, and then release the outcome. Every person on this list did exactly that, across industries and continents and starting positions that had almost nothing in common with each other.

The gap between where they started and where they ended up was not talent, timing, or family. It was the decision to start at all, and then the refusal to stop.

If you want to put your money to work the halal way, you do not need a billion-dollar idea. You need a starting point. Wahed is built for exactly that — from as little as RM100, the same kind of modest beginning every billionaire on this list once had.