We are not advisers or scholars. We are researchers.
Islamic Mortgage Guide is an independent research site covering UK Islamic mortgages and home purchase plans. We read the documents, check figures against the primary sources, record the date we checked them, and publish what we found, including the parts we could not establish.
Stated once, up front
There is no personal byline on this site, and no photograph of a team. That is a decision, not an oversight, and the rest of this page explains it rather than hoping you do not notice.
Operated from the United Kingdom as an independent publishing project. Not incorporated, not a regulated financial firm, and not owned in whole or part by any lender or provider.
Who operates this site
Two different questions get confused here, so it is worth separating them. Who writes the pages, and who is accountable for the site as a business. The first is answered below and the answer is deliberate. The second deserves a plain answer too.
Islamic Mortgage Guide is an independent publishing project run from the United Kingdom. There is no company behind it at the moment, because there is no company: it is not incorporated, it holds no regulatory permissions, and it is not part of any bank, provider or broker. When it is incorporated, the registered name and company number will appear here and in the site footer, because that is the sort of thing a reader is entitled to check rather than infer.
What we will not do to fill that gap. We are not going to print a company name that does not exist, or imply a corporate structure we have not registered, in order to look more substantial than we are. The same rule that keeps invented people off this site keeps invented entities off it.
What this site is
A research operation with a publishing habit. We track 13 propositions in the UK Islamic home finance market, hold 44 canonical facts about them drawn from 58 registered sources, and record every change we observe with a date. The evidence sits beside the figure rather than in a bibliography, so you can check a claim at the moment you read it.
The market is small and badly documented. Rate cards go stale, criteria live in intermediary PDFs that consumers never see, and the same provider will publish two different answers to the same question on two of its own pages. Most of what we do is the unglamorous work of reading those documents properly and writing down what they actually say.
Why there is no name on this page
Financial sites are expected to show you a person: a photograph, a job title, a short biography establishing why they are worth listening to. We know the expectation, and we know that not meeting it costs us something with readers and with search engines. We are not going to meet it dishonestly.
We could manufacture the appearance of authority with an invented byline, a stock portrait and credentials we cannot evidence. We will not. On a site about money and faith, that would be a lie at the exact point where you are being asked to trust it.
What we did instead
We built the site so that trusting us is optional. Every material figure carries the source it came from and the date we read it. Where a provider's own documents disagree, we publish the disagreement rather than the tidier number. Where a check failed, we say so and give the date we tried. A biography is not a substitute for checkable evidence, and evidence is not a substitute for qualified review: they answer different questions. Until named reviewers are in place, the evidence attached to each claim is the part you can verify directly.
The methodology page sets out how that works in full: where figures come from, which source wins when they conflict, the states a fact can hold, and the checks that run before anything publishes.
When named people will appear, and who they will be
Named humans are coming, in an order, and for reasons. Only the first row below is live today. The rest is published as a plan so that you can hold us to it, and so that nobody mistakes the plan for the present.
| Stage | Who | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| NowLive now | The Islamic Mortgage Guide research team | Pages are published under the site rather than under individual bylines. The work is checkable because the evidence is attached to each figure, not because a name is attached to the page. |
| NextNot yet | Named people we interview | Advisers, provider staff and others who agree to be quoted on the record. Their words, their names, their attribution. We do not invent quotes and we do not paraphrase someone into sounding like an endorsement. |
| ThenNot yet | A named, qualified reviewer | A qualified home-finance adviser reviewing the money pages, with three things you can check separately: the qualification, CeMAP or an appropriate equivalent; the current firm and regulatory role, verifiable on the FCA Register; and the experience, including work on home purchase plans specifically rather than mortgages generally. |
| LaterNot yet | The person who runs this | Named here once formally qualified in Islamic finance rather than before. A name added early would be decoration; a name added with a qualification behind it is information. |
The rule underneath all of it. We do not invent people. No fabricated authors, no invented quotes, no credentials we cannot evidence, and no humans generated for illustrations. If a person appears on this site, they exist, they agreed, and you can check them.
How the work is done
Provider documents first: rate cards, criteria guides, tariffs, certificates. Then official registers for regulatory and corporate facts. We do not use other comparison sites as sources, because a number copied from a competitor arrives without its evidence and carries their mistakes into our records.
A search result summarising a document is a pointer to a source, never a source. Everything published here is read from the document itself, including the ones that are scanned images and have to be rendered before they can be read at all. It is slower and it is the only part that actually matters.
Claims on this site follow one rule. Where we are describing our own conduct, we state it flatly, because we control it. Where we are describing the market, we scope the claim to the sources we examined and the date we examined them, because we cannot see all of it. That is why some sentences here carry dates and others do not.
What we are not
- Not a lender. No bank or provider owns any part of this site.
- Not brokers or advisers. We are not authorised to advise and we do not. When you want advice, the right person is an FCA-authorised specialist.
- Not scholars. Where scholars differ about a product we report the published positions with attribution. We record who certified what and when. We do not issue rulings.
- Not a ratings site. We do not score providers or name a best one. Suitability depends on circumstances we cannot see, and that judgement belongs to someone authorised to make it.
Independence, and who pays
You never pay us anything. The intended model is that an FCA-authorised firm pays us for an introduction you chose to make. That route is not switched on, and the exact basis of the fee is not settled, which how we make money sets out in full. When it is, it will be disclosed where it applies rather than buried, and explained in full on how we make money.
No commercial relationship affects which propositions appear in the register or the order they appear in a comparison. That is enforced rather than promised: the build fails if commercial configuration can reach the code that ranks, matches or prices anything, which is one of the checks described on the methodology page.
What we have got wrong
73 corrections are recorded so far, alongside 4 logged research attempts that did not produce a usable answer. Some of the corrections were ours before anything published: a fee that had landed in the wrong column of an imported workbook, a figure inferred from one document's silence when another document from the same provider said otherwise, a provider recorded as publishing nothing when its criteria guide sat behind a document hub we had not opened.
We publish them because a site that never corrects itself in public is not more accurate than one that does. It is quieter about it. The change log holds them all with dates, including what we said before and what the source actually showed.
Telling us we are wrong
If a figure here is out of date or plainly incorrect, we want to know, and the most useful report names the page, the figure and what the provider's own document says.
We do not yet publish an address for that. Rather than describe a process we are not running, it goes live with the site. The correction policy itself already operates and every change we have made is in the log.
Common questions
- Who writes Islamic Mortgage Guide?
- A research team publishing under the site name rather than under individual bylines. That is a deliberate choice: we would rather publish no name than an invented one, and we would rather you checked the evidence attached to each figure than took a byline on trust. Named people will appear as interviewees and as a qualified named reviewer, and when they do they will be real and checkable.
- Is Islamic Mortgage Guide regulated by the FCA?
- Islamic Mortgage Guide is not FCA-authorised. We publish research, comparisons and tools. We do not give personal recommendations, accept applications, negotiate finance or arrange home purchase plans, and we do not currently refer readers to advisers. Before any adviser-referral service goes live we will review the applicable perimeter and financial-promotion requirements and disclose how the arrangement works.
- Do you rule on whether a product is halal?
- No. We record what standards bodies require, which body certified which product and on what date, and where scholars have published differing positions we report them with attribution. That is a research function. Issuing a religious ruling is not, and we do not do it.
- Who pays for this site?
- Nothing is paid by you. The intended model is that an FCA-authorised firm pays us for an introduction you chose to make. That route is not live, and the exact basis of the fee is not yet settled. When it is, it will be disclosed at the point it applies, and it will not change which providers appear or the order they appear in.