Аңдатпа
Kazakhstan was the one of the first Central Asian country to adopt a legal framework for Islamic finance, and roughly 70 percent of its population identifies as Muslim, yet the practical uptake of Islamic financial products remains modest. Existing research on the subject, most of it produced by a relatively small circle of Kazakhstani scholars, has concentrated on institutional and regulatory constraints; ordinary consumers’ awareness, attitudes, and behavior have received comparatively little independent empirical attention, either in Kazakhstan or in the wider post-Soviet Muslim-majority region of Central Asia and the Caucasus. This paper addresses that gap through an original online survey of 224 residents of Kazakhstan collected. The questionnaire covered awareness of Islamic financial instruments, willingness to choose an Islamic bank for deposits and financing, consumption of halal products, perceptions of the social orientation of Islamic finance, charitable giving (sadaqah) practices, perceived barriers to diffusion, and preferences regarding an Islamic pension option. The findings show that despite limited substantive financial literacy — about 69 percent of respondents could not name concrete features of Islamic finance — more than half would consider an Islamic bank for deposits, and over 80 percent report some form of charitable giving. Respondents with substantive knowledge of Islamic finance were nearly one-and-a-half times more likely to prefer an Islamic bank than uninformed respondents. The dominant perceived barrier is a lack of accessible, trustworthy information (57.6 percent) rather than an absence of legislation. The results are interpreted through the region’s “institutional traps” literature and a wider cross-national body of Islamic-banking-adoption and halal-consumption research, and suggest that the gap between formal institutions and everyday practice across the post-Soviet Muslim world stems primarily from an information and trust deficit rather than from weak underlying demand.