Аннотация
Introduction: Kazakhstan has the most developed Islamic finance infrastructure in the post-Soviet space – three operating Islamic banks, a dedicated regulator within the Astana International Financial Centre, and a 2020-2025 Master Plan targeting a 3-5 percent share of Islamic banking assets. By end-2025 that share stood at only 0.44 percent, while 13 percent of adults remained unbanked and gender and rural inclusion gaps persisted. This study examines under what institutional conditions Islamic banking can move from a niche product line to a working instrument of social-financial inclusion. Methods: Four-track mixed-methods design: 1) time series of Islamic banking assets and their share for 2018-2025 from NBK, ARRFM, and AFSA reporting; 2) cross-country comparison using Global Findex 2021 and 2024; 3) documentary content analysis of the AIFC Master Plan, the IMF FSAP Technical Note on AIFC (2024), the World Bank FSAP (2024), the IsDBI-AIFC Kazakhstan Country Report (2024), and the EDB-IsDBI-LSEG joint report (2025); 4) qualitative synthesis of peer-reviewed expert and focus-group studies. Results: Islamic banking assets grew 7.5-fold – from KZT 42 billion in 2018 to KZT 315 billion in 2025 – yet their share moved only from 0.17 percent to 0.44 percent, leaving a 2.56 percentage-point gap (5.8× the current share) to the Master Plan lower bound. Account ownership reached 87 percent in 2024, second in the region only to Ukraine. Religious self-exclusion accounted for an estimated 11 percent of the unbanked, against 23-35 percent in other Central Asian states. Murabaha and ijara concentrated above 90 percent of demand. The banking law in force from March 2026 authorizes Islamic windows in conventional banks. The Tayyab Finance retail auto-financing programme (KZT 20 billion, 2025) and the first retail sukuk on the Astana International Exchange marked the first measurable retail and SME move. Discussion: The decoupling between absolute growth and market share, together with persistent awareness, trust, and product-range constraints, is consistent with the «institutional traps» framework: weak state support, low household awareness, and an unfilled product menu reinforce one another. Islamic windows in conventional banks combined with retail product innovation shift the binding constraint from supply to awareness – better addressed through financial literacy and Islamic social-finance instruments than through additional licences. Scientific Novelty: The paper integrates macro-financial banking statistics, Findex-based inclusion indicators, and institutional-policy analysis in one frame and treats Islamic banking development as a measurable inclusion instrument rather than as a separate niche segment. It develops a typology of inclusion-relevant Islamic finance instruments mapped onto Kazakhstan’s specific exclusion patterns and provides explicit benchmarks for monitoring against the Master Plan 2020-2025 and the EDB-IsDBI-LSEG 2033 projection. Practical Implications: Four priority levers: phased deployment of Islamic windows under the March 2026 law; a retail and SME pivot via standardized murabaha, ijara, and qard hasan products; integration of Islamic-finance modules into the national financial literacy programme; and a regulated framework for Islamic social-finance instruments – zakat, waqf, and benevolent loans – channelling philanthropic flows to underserved rural and female segments. Each lever is linked to a measurable Findex indicator and to the Master Plan target trajectory.