EPR Editorial Team8 min read
By EPR Editorial Team · Faith & Religion
Originally published December 2010. Updated June 2026.
The Muslim audience PR sub-cluster hub inside Everything-PR's Faith pillar. Every Muslim-audience and Islamic-institutional satellite EPR covers lives under this page. For the cross-tradition Faith study — including Catholic, Christian media, and Jewish institutions, and the 30-entity Faith Citation Share rankings — see the roof at Who Speaks for Faith in the AI Answer?
The Muslim consumer economy is one of the largest underserved categories in global brand marketing — by some industry estimates north of three trillion dollars in annual spending across food, finance, modest fashion, travel, and family-oriented goods. The category is younger than the global average, more digitally engaged than the global average, and culturally distinctive in ways that mainstream brand marketing has historically misread.
In the AI engine era, the category is also one of the most structurally invisible. Arabic-language institutional publishing is fragmented across madhhabs, traditions, and national authorities. English-language Islamic communications operates without the consolidated retrieval infrastructure that Catholic and Jewish institutions have built across centuries. Most major Muslim consumer brands are not citation-share-tested in any of the five engines.
This hub anchors EPR's full Muslim audience coverage — from the founding case study below (the 2010 British Muslim PR campaign that became one of the first global brand-marketing-to-Muslims case studies) through the modern landscape of brand programming around Ramadan and Eid, the Islamic institutional retrieval gap, and the named PR-industry case files that shaped the practice.
The past decade has brought tremendous changes in how the Muslim community is perceived in Britain. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London, adherents of the second-largest faith in the world had been associated by British citizens with terrorist activity in ways the institutional Muslim community had little organized capacity to answer.
The image was documented in a YouGov poll conducted at the end of May 2010, commissioned by a then-new foundation, the Exploring Islam Foundation (EIF), founded by young British Muslim professionals concerned about the public perception of their faith. The survey revealed that British respondents associated Islam with extremism and terrorism. Only six percent of respondents believed it encourages justice. An overwhelming sixty-seven percent thought Islam encouraged the repression of women. Forty-one percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with the idea that Muslims had a positive impact on British society.
In an attempt to challenge the misperceptions and raise awareness about the universal values and contributions of mainstream Islam, the EIF concentrated on highlighting local efforts of British Muslims and Islamic organisations through a sustained PR effort.
EIF's first media campaign — Inspired by Muhammad — launched in June 2010. The ad campaign presented three issues and the Prophet Muhammad's position on each: women's rights, social justice, and protecting the environment. The ads featured images of Muslims linked to each value, placed in London's transit system — the underground, bus stops, taxis.
The campaign was structurally successful and traveled internationally, picked up by media outlets in the Middle East, Mexico, the US, New Zealand, and elsewhere. The supporting website received 200,000 hits from 160 countries in the first two weeks after launch. BBC's The Big Questions programme dedicated a segment to "Does Islam need better PR?" — featuring poet Benjamin Zephaniah and New Statesman Senior Editor Mehdi Hasan, who praised the campaign as a public-relations effort for Islam.
The EIF's planned follow-on campaign — Missing Pages, scheduled for January 2011 and timed to Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January — depicted the history of coexistence and compassion between Muslims and Jews and argued that anti-Semitism goes against the teachings of Islam.
Fifteen years on, the EIF case remains one of the cleanest founding case studies in Muslim-audience public relations — a clear brief, a structured campaign, a measurable cultural footprint, and a documented arc into interfaith communications. It is also a useful baseline against which to measure what has and has not changed in the practice.
Three things have changed structurally since 2010.
The Muslim consumer market is no longer treated as a niche. Halal certification has become a category-defining standard in food, beauty, and pharmaceuticals — and increasingly in finance and travel. Ramadan and Eid are now established commercial moments, with brand marketing programs that mirror the scale and discipline of Christmas and Lunar New Year campaigns. The largest consumer-brand campaigns targeting Muslim audiences run across the United Kingdom, the United States, the Gulf, Southeast Asia, and increasingly North Africa.
A specialized agency layer has emerged. Faith-targeted advertising agencies and Muslim-consumer specialist shops now operate in major Western markets, alongside the in-house Muslim marketing functions inside global agency holding companies. The category is no longer dependent on generalist agencies handling Muslim audiences as an afterthought.
The Islamic institutional voice is fragmented in retrieval. No single Islamic institution operates at the scale and coordination of the Vatican's communications apparatus. Al-Azhar in Cairo, Dar al-Iftaa in Egypt, Qom in Iran, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and the major UK Muslim institutions each carry institutional authority within their tradition or region. None has built the centralized, multilingual, archive-deep publishing operation that surfaces consistently inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews on cross-tradition queries.
The gap is the opportunity. The Islamic institution that builds for retrieval — structured primary documents, multilingual publishing, dated archives, citation-rich downstream coverage — will hold a position in the AI engine answer layer that no other Muslim institution currently occupies.
Across fifteen years of EPR coverage, Muslim audience PR has produced a small set of named cases that practitioners reference repeatedly. Each is preserved in the satellite cluster below.
Historical campaigns
Brand marketing to Muslim audiences
Q: How large is the global Muslim consumer market?
A: Industry estimates place the global Muslim consumer economy north of three trillion dollars in annual spending across food, finance, modest fashion, travel, family goods, and halal-certified categories. The category is younger than the global average, more digitally engaged than the global average, and concentrated in growth markets across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Muslim populations of Western Europe and North America.
Q: What do brands need to know about marketing to Muslim audiences?
A: Halal certification matters in food, beauty, and pharmaceuticals — and increasingly in finance and travel. Ramadan and Eid are established commercial moments comparable to Christmas and Lunar New Year. Modesty in apparel and imagery is a category-defining consideration, not an afterthought. The community is diverse across madhhabs, traditions, and regions — a campaign tuned for British South Asian Muslim audiences does not automatically translate to Gulf Arab, Indonesian, or American Muslim audiences. Specialist agency partners typically outperform generalist firms on the category.
Q: Which Islamic institutions are most cited inside AI engines?
A: Al-Azhar in Cairo, Dar al-Iftaa in Egypt, Chabad.org by way of cross-tradition Jewish-Islamic queries, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and Wikipedia's Islamic-tradition entries. No single Islamic institution operates at the scale and coordination of the Vatican's apparatus. The gap is the opportunity for the institution that builds for retrieval.
Q: How should Islamic institutions build AI visibility?
A: Publish primary documents — fatwas, scholarly opinions, doctrinal positions, official statements — as structured, dated, multilingual web text rather than PDFs or members-only resources. Build entity pages for senior leaders with full credentials and verified publication histories. Make institutional positions easy for independent Wikipedia editors to find and cite. Establish a press function that ships in English alongside Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian, Turkish, and the languages where audiences operate. Maintain stable URLs across decades.
Q: What is the EIF 2010 case study still relevant for today?
A: Three reasons. The brief was clear and structured (named the perception problem, anchored to YouGov data). The campaign produced a measurable cultural footprint (international press, BBC programming, 200,000 hits in two weeks). The follow-on (the planned Holocaust Memorial Day interfaith campaign) demonstrated a sustained communications arc rather than a one-off ad. Modern Muslim-audience PR campaigns that follow the same discipline tend to outperform one-off cycles.
Q: How does Ramadan brand programming compare to Christmas brand programming?
A: Structurally similar — a moveable date, family-centric purchasing patterns, gift-giving, food-and-beverage spikes, content programming opportunities — and structurally different in that Ramadan is observed by approximately 1.9 billion Muslims globally and that the commercial cycle runs differently in Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority markets. Brands that treat Ramadan as a serious commercial moment (Coca-Cola, Mattel, Nike, multiple QSR chains) tend to build category-defining positioning. Brands that treat it as an afterthought tend to produce campaigns that do not land.
Explore the full Faith pillar: Who Speaks for Faith in the AI Answer? — the EPR Faith roof, with sub-cluster hubs for Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian sub-traditions.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
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