Women in Islamic Markets: Empowerment and Economic Participation in Capitalist Societies

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Setting the Stage: Women, Faith, and Modern Economies
• Chapter 2 Foundations of Financial Participation in Islamic Societies
• Chapter 3 The Gender Gap in Capitalist Societies: A Historical Perspective
• Chapter 4 Financial Inclusion Through an Explatory Lens
• Chapter 5 Barriers to Financial Inclusion for Women in Conservative Contexts
• Chapter 6 Opportunity Structures: How Open and Closed Economies Shape Women’s Financial Roles
• Chapter 7 Microfinance as an Entry Point for Women’s Economic Empowerment
• Chapter 8 Success Stories of Grassroots Microfinance Initiatives
• Chapter 9 Navigating the Tensions Between Development and Cultural Norms
• Chapter 10 Educational Pathways: Building Skills for Business and Leadership
• Chapter 11 Mentorship and Network Building Among Women Entrepreneurs
• Chapter 12 The Intersectionality of Gender, Religion, and Economic Access
• Chapter 13 Negotiating the Traditional Capitalist Economy
• Chapter 14 Digital Entrepreneurship and Women’s Agency
• Chapter 15 Creating and Scaling Women-Owned Businesses
• Chapter 16 Measuring the Multiplier Effects
• Chapter 17 Integrating into Global and Domestic Markets
• Chapter 18 Labor Laws, Property Rights, and Mobility
• Chapter 19 Why Representation and Voice Matter
• Chapter 20 Policy Frameworks for Inclusive Economic Systems
• Chapter 21 What Does Transformative Change Look Like Over Time?
• Chapter 22 Religious Narratives and Media Portrayals of Women’s Work
• Chapter 23 Social Innovations and Corporate Engagement
• Chapter 24 From Local Markets to Global Platforms in a Connected World
• Chapter 25 Strategies for Sustaining Economic Progress

In the bustling souks of Marrakech, the gleaming towers of Dubai, and the orderly corridors of Islamic banks in Kuala Lumpur, a quiet revolution is unfolding. Women who a generation ago were largely absent from formal financial life are opening business accounts, applying for halal-compliant loans, and founding enterprises that blend faith-inspired values with market ambition. This book is an account of that revolution—its contours, its contradictions, and its considerable unfinished agenda. It argues that women’s economic participation in Islamic and Islamic-adjacent markets is not a story that fits comfortably into any single narrative, whether of inevitable modernization, of unchanging patriarchy, or of uniformly emancipatory finance. Instead, it is a layered process shaped by religious interpretation, state regulation, family structure, digital infrastructure, and the stubborn stickiness of gendered social norms, all of which interact in ways that are sometimes surprising and often more hopeful than external observers expect.

The central question of this volume is deceptively simple: under what conditions, and through which institutional innovations, do women in conservative Islamic societies move from the margins toward affordable and meaningful participation in capitalist economies? The answer, developed over the following twenty-five chapters, is anything but simple. Women do not enter a single “market” or encounter a single form of Islam or negotiate a single type of patriarchy. They enter differentiated opportunity structures—some tightly regulated by religious jurisprudence, others by secular law, still others by informal community expectations that carry the weight of sacred authority. To make sense of these overlapping domains, the book draws on finance, anthropology, feminist theory, and political economy, while insisting that the voices of women themselves remain at the center of the analysis. Case studies, policy documents, and contemporary scholarship are woven together to trace how entrepreneurship, religious identity, and economic agency can fruitfully intersect.

Women’s financial inclusion has become a global policy buzzword, and for good reason. Development institutions have spent decades arguing that giving women access to bank accounts, credit, and payment systems not only narrows gender gaps but also reduces poverty, improves health and education outcomes, and promotes macroeconomic stability. Yet the instruments of inclusion—microfinance schemes, mobile savings platforms, entrepreneurship accelerators—rarely travel to new cultural contexts unchanged. In Islamic societies, conversations about “empowerment” are inevitably entangled with questions about religious legitimacy: Is a given financial product truly compliant with prohibitions on usury and uncertainty? Does female entrepreneurship challenge, reinforce, or subtly reinterpret prevailing norms about modesty, family roles, and public presence? This book takes these questions seriously, treating them not as obstacles to be dismissed but as central to understanding how inclusion is actually experienced and negotiated on the ground.

The scope of the book is deliberately broad, both geographically and conceptually. While it pays particular attention to Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, it also considers diaspora communities in Europe and North America, where women navigate Islamic finance and capitalist markets simultaneously. The chapters move from foundational discussions of Islamic economic principles and historical patterns of women’s work to granular analyses of microfinance institutions, digital platforms, labor law, and media representation. Throughout, the aim is to show how macro-level structures—trade regimes, banking regulations, religious authority—translate into micro-level decisions: whether a young woman in Lahore can open a business account without a male guardian, whether a mother in Cairo can use her phone to save for her children’s education, whether a female entrepreneur in Jakarta can scale her enterprise without compromising her religious commitments.

A recurring theme is that empowerment is neither linear nor uniform. Access to a bank account does not automatically translate into decision-making power within the household; a successful startup does not necessarily challenge the broader structures that constrain other women. The book therefore distinguishes between different dimensions of empowerment—economic, social, political, and psychological—and examines how they interact. It also foregrounds the role of intermediaries: religious scholars who reinterpret classical texts, NGO workers who design culturally sensitive training programs, policymakers who craft gender-responsive regulations, and peer networks that provide both practical advice and moral support. These actors, often overlooked in top-down accounts of development, are shown to be crucial in translating formal rights into lived realities.

At the same time, the book does not shy away from tensions and trade-offs. Efforts to promote women’s economic participation can clash with deeply held beliefs about gender roles, provoking backlash or co-optation. Financial instruments marketed as “empowering” sometimes reproduce dependency or indebtedness. Global narratives of “Muslim women’s entrepreneurship” risk flattening diverse experiences into a single success story that serves external agendas more than local needs. By foregrounding these dilemmas, the volume aims to equip readers—scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and students—with the analytical tools to assess claims of empowerment critically and to design interventions that are both effective and respectful of the communities they seek to serve.

Ultimately, this book is an invitation to rethink what economic participation means in contexts where faith and capitalism are not opposing forces but intertwined realities. It suggests that the future of women’s economic empowerment in Islamic markets will be shaped less by grand ideological pronouncements than by the cumulative effect of countless small negotiations: a banker who accepts alternative forms of collateral, a family that allows a daughter to attend a business workshop, a religious authority that endorses women’s right to own property, a digital platform that makes financial services accessible from a smartphone. By tracing these negotiations across different scales and settings, the chapters that follow seek to illuminate not only where progress has been made but also where the most promising—and most contested—frontiers lie.

The relationship between women, Islamic faith, and economic life is far more textured than popular narratives tend to suggest. Headlines oscillate between images of silent victims and triumphant entrepreneurs, rarely pausing to examine the dense institutional, theological, and social terrain that shapes how women actually earn, save, invest, and borrow. This chapter maps that terrain. It introduces the core concepts that will thread through the book—financial inclusion, empowerment, Islamic markets, and conservative societies—while grounding them in the lived realities of women who navigate these overlapping systems daily. The aim is not to offer a single thesis but to set up a framework flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of experiences that follow in later chapters.

To begin, it helps to abandon the notion that “the Islamic market” is a single, coherent entity. The term is useful as a shorthand, but it obscures enormous variation. A sharia-compliant investment fund operating out of Bahrain follows different regulatory standards than a cooperative savings group in rural Bangladesh that brands itself Islamic because its members prefer to avoid conventional interest-bearing accounts. A Turkish woman trading on a digital platform and a Saudi woman launching a home-based fashion label both participate in Islamic markets, yet the rules they encounter, the constraints they face, and the opportunities available to them differ substantially. Recognizing this variation is essential to avoiding the analytical flattening that plagues much writing on women in Muslim-majority economies.

The same caution applies to the word “conservative.” In this book, conservative societies are those in which traditional interpretations of gender roles carry significant weight in shaping access to resources, mobility, and public space. This conservatism is not monolithic. It can be encoded in family law, reinforced by tribal custom, upheld by religious authorities, or simply embedded in everyday habits that no one thinks to question. In some contexts, conservatism manifests as legal barriers—requirements for male guardianship to sign a lease or open a bank account. In others, it operates through social expectations: a woman may have the formal right to work, but her family may consider it shameful for her to do so outside the home. These distinctions matter because they determine which interventions are likely to succeed and which are likely to provoke resistance.

Faith, meanwhile, is not simply a constraint or a resource; it is both, often simultaneously. Islamic teachings have been invoked to justify women’s exclusion from certain economic activities, but they have also been marshaled to support women’s property rights, access to education, and participation in public life. The Qur’anic verses and prophetic traditions that underpin Islamic finance are subject to interpretation, and those interpretations have shifted over time and across schools of thought. A woman in northern Nigeria may encounter religious arguments that discourage her from entering a bank, while her counterpart in Malaysia may be encouraged by religious leaders to use Islamic financial products as a more pious alternative to conventional banking. The point is not that one context is more “authentically” Islamic than the other, but that religious texts interact with local power structures, colonial histories, and economic conditions in ways that produce very different outcomes.

This interplay between text and context is central to understanding how Islamic markets function. Islamic finance, at its core, is a set of prohibitions and principles: the prohibition of riba, often translated as usury or interest; the prohibition of gharar, or excessive uncertainty; the requirement that financial transactions be linked to real economic activity; and the obligation to avoid investments in industries deemed haram, such as alcohol, gambling, or certain forms of entertainment. These rules have generated a sophisticated global industry of sukuk (Islamic bonds), takaful (Islamic insurance), and sharia-compliant equity funds. Yet the degree to which ordinary women participate in this industry, and the terms on which they do so, depend on factors that have little to do with jurisprudence and everything to do with education, infrastructure, and social norms.

Financial inclusion, a term that will recur throughout this book, refers to the ability of individuals and businesses to access useful and affordable financial products and services—payments, savings, credit, insurance—delivered in a responsible and sustainable way. For women in Islamic societies, inclusion is not just about having a bank account. It is about whether that account can be opened without a male co-signer, whether the bank’s hours and locations are accessible to women who cannot travel freely, whether the products on offer align with religious convictions, and whether using those products exposes a woman to social stigma or family conflict. Inclusion, in other words, is a multidimensional phenomenon that cannot be captured by a single metric.

The global policy community has increasingly recognized that financial inclusion is not a gender-neutral process. Women are more likely than men to be unbanked, more likely to rely on informal savings mechanisms, and more likely to face discrimination in credit markets. In Muslim-majority countries, these gender gaps are compounded by additional layers of complexity. Religious interpretations may restrict women’s ability to enter into financial contracts independently. Cultural norms may discourage women from mixing with male bank staff or from traveling to urban centers where banks are concentrated. Legal frameworks may fail to protect women’s property rights or to criminalize financial abuse within marriage. These overlapping barriers mean that standard inclusion strategies—building more bank branches, launching mobile money platforms, offering business training—may be necessary but are rarely sufficient.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to portray women in Islamic societies as passive recipients of structural forces. Throughout history, women have found ways to participate in economic life even under highly restrictive conditions. In pre-Islamic Arabia, Khadij bint Khuwaylid, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, was a prominent merchant who managed her own trade caravans. In the medieval period, women across the Islamic world endowed and managed waqf (religious foundations), taught in madrasas, and engaged in textile production, agriculture, and petty trade. The colonial era disrupted many of these activities, but it also created new opportunities—and new constraints—as European powers imposed their own legal and economic systems on colonized populations. Understanding this longer history is essential to avoiding the ahistorical framing that treats women’s economic participation as a twenty-first-century invention.

The contemporary landscape is shaped by the legacies of that history, combined with the forces of globalization, urbanization, and technological change. The oil boom of the twentieth century transformed the Gulf states, creating new wealth and new patterns of gendered economic participation. Labor migration from South and Southeast Asia to the Gulf created transnational households in which women managed finances back home while men worked abroad. The rise of Islamic banking from the 1970s onward offered new financial instruments that appealed to religiously observant populations, but also raised questions about whether these instruments were genuinely more inclusive for women or simply replicated conventional banking structures with different labels. More recently, the digital revolution has opened new frontiers: fintech startups, e-commerce platforms, and mobile payment systems are lowering some barriers while potentially reinforcing others.

This book is organized around the idea that women’s economic participation in Islamic markets is best understood through the lens of opportunity structures—the formal and informal rules, institutions, and networks that shape what is possible for a given woman in a given context. Opportunity structures are not fixed; they are constantly being reshaped by policy reforms, technological innovations, religious debates, and social movements. A change in family law, a new interpretation of a classical text, the arrival of a mobile banking app, or the emergence of a women’s business association can all shift the boundaries of what is thinkable and doable. By focusing on these shifts, the book aims to identify not only the obstacles that remain but also the leverage points where targeted intervention can make a difference.

A few conceptual distinctions will help guide the analysis. First, it is important to distinguish between access and usage. A woman may have formal access to a bank account but never use it because she does not trust the institution, because her husband controls the password, or because the account requires a minimum balance she cannot maintain. Usage, in turn, is not the same as agency. A woman may use a mobile payment platform but have no say in how the money she transfers is spent. Agency implies some degree of control over financial decisions, and it is this dimension of empowerment that is most difficult to achieve and most important to understand.

Second, the book distinguishes between individual and structural change. An individual woman who successfully launches a business or secures a loan has achieved something significant, but her success does not automatically translate into broader change for other women. Structural change requires shifts in laws, norms, institutions, and market practices that expand opportunities for entire categories of women—those in rural areas, those from lower-income households, those belonging to minority sects or ethnic groups. Both individual and structural change matter, and the book examines how they interact, sometimes reinforcing each other and sometimes pulling in opposite directions.

Third, the analysis pays attention to the difference between formal and informal economic activity. Much of women’s economic participation in conservative societies takes place in the informal sector—home-based enterprises, rotating savings groups, unregistered businesses—where it is less visible to policymakers and regulators but no less real. Informal economic activity can offer flexibility and autonomy, but it also limits access to formal financial services, legal protections, and opportunities for scaling. Understanding the dynamics of informality is essential to designing interventions that reach women where they actually are, rather than where policymakers assume them to be.

The geographical scope of the book reflects the diversity of the Islamic world. Case studies and examples are drawn from the Middle East and North Africa, where oil wealth and state-led development have created distinctive patterns of gendered economic participation; from South Asia, where colonial legacies and postcolonial nation-building projects have shaped women’s legal and economic status in complex ways; from Southeast Asia, where countries like Indonesia and Malaysia have become laboratories for Islamic finance and women’s entrepreneurship; and from sub-Saharan Africa, where Muslim communities navigate plural legal systems and rapidly changing economic landscapes. The book also considers diaspora communities in Europe and North America, where women negotiate Islamic financial norms within the framework of advanced capitalist economies.

Each of these regions has its own history of women’s economic engagement. In the Gulf states, for example, the discovery of oil initially drew men into the public sector workforce while women remained at home, but rising education levels and state diversification strategies have gradually pushed more women into employment, albeit often in gender-segregated environments. In South Asia, the colonial period saw the codification of personal status laws that restricted women’s property rights, effects of which are still felt today. In Southeast Asia, women have long been active in trade and agriculture, and the growth of Islamic finance has created new opportunities for them to access credit and savings products that align with their religious values. These regional specificities are not mere background; they are integral to understanding how global trends—financialization, digitization, liberalization—play out on the ground.

The role of the state is particularly important in shaping women’s economic opportunities. In some countries, governments have actively promoted women’s financial inclusion through policy reforms, targeted programs, and legal changes. In others, state policies have reinforced gender inequalities, either deliberately or as an unintended consequence of broader economic strategies. The relationship between state and market is mediated by religious institutions, which may support or oppose state initiatives depending on their own interests and interpretations. A government that wants to expand women’s access to credit may find its efforts bolstered by sympathetic religious leaders or undermined by conservative scholars who view female economic independence as a threat to social order.

International development organizations have also played a significant role, for better and for worse. The World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and various bilateral agencies have invested heavily in financial inclusion programs, often with a specific focus on women. These programs have generated valuable data and have expanded access for many, but they have also been criticized for imposing one-size-fits-all models that fail to account for local contexts, for prioritizing quantitative metrics over qualitative outcomes, and for treating women as instruments of economic growth rather than as agents with their own goals and values. The book engages with these critiques, drawing on evidence from the field to assess what works, what doesn’t, and why.

One of the challenges of writing about women in Islamic markets is the temptation to treat Islam as the primary explanatory variable. This is both analytically misleading and politically fraught. Islam is a major source of normative guidance for billions of people, and its teachings on economic ethics are genuinely important. But women’s economic outcomes are shaped by a wide range of factors—macroeconomic conditions, legal frameworks, educational systems, family structures, ethnic and caste dynamics, conflict and displacement—that cannot be reduced to religion alone. The book therefore treats Islam as one dimension of a multidimensional analysis, examining how it interacts with other factors rather than privileging it as the master key.

This approach has implications for how the book handles questions of religious authority. Who speaks for Islam on economic matters? The answer varies enormously. In some countries, official religious establishments issue fatwas and guidelines that carry significant weight. In others, authority is more diffuse, distributed among scholars, community leaders, and popular preachers. Women themselves are not passive recipients of religious guidance; many are actively engaged in interpreting texts, debating norms, and pushing for readings that support their economic participation. The book highlights these voices, recognizing that the struggle over meaning is as much a part of the story as the struggle over resources.

The concept of empowerment, which appears in the title of this book, requires careful handling. In development discourse, empowerment has become a buzzword that is often invoked but rarely defined with precision. For the purposes of this book, empowerment refers to the expansion of people’s ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied to them. This definition, drawn from the work of scholars like Naila Kabeer, emphasizes agency, resources, and achievements. Resources include not only financial assets but also human capital (education, skills), social capital (networks, relationships), and political capital (voice, representation). Achievements are the outcomes that result from the use of resources—starting a business, gaining a promotion, influencing a policy decision.

Empowerment, so understood, is not something that can be delivered from outside. It is a process that people undertake for themselves, often in the face of considerable resistance. External interventions—training programs, microfinance schemes, legal reforms—can support this process by expanding the resources available to women and by challenging the structures that constrain their choices. But they cannot substitute for women’s own agency, and they can sometimes undermine it if they are designed without input from the women they are meant to serve. The book keeps this tension in view, examining both the potential and the limitations of external interventions.

The economic dimensions of empowerment are particularly salient in the context of Islamic markets. Access to finance can enable women to start or expand businesses, smooth consumption, invest in their children’s education, and build resilience against shocks. But finance is also a site of potential harm. Indebtedness, financial fraud, and exploitative lending practices can trap women in cycles of poverty and dependency. Islamic finance, with its emphasis on risk-sharing and ethical investment, offers a potential alternative to some of these harms, but it is not immune to them. The book examines both the promise and the perils of Islamic financial products for women, drawing on empirical evidence from a range of settings.

The social dimensions of empowerment are equally important. Economic participation can change how women are perceived by their families and communities, and how they perceive themselves. Earning an income can increase a woman’s bargaining power within the household, giving her more say in decisions about children’s schooling, healthcare, and family planning. It can also expose her to new ideas and networks, broadening her sense of what is possible. But economic participation can also generate conflict, particularly if it is seen as threatening established gender roles. The book pays close attention to these social dynamics, recognizing that empowerment is not just about money but about relationships.

The political dimensions of empowerment, while less central to this book than the economic and social ones, are not negligible. Women who gain economic independence are sometimes better positioned to participate in public life, to advocate for policy changes, and to challenge discriminatory laws and practices. Conversely, women who lack economic resources may find it difficult to engage in political action, even when they have the desire to do so. The book touches on these connections where relevant, particularly in later chapters that deal with policy frameworks and collective action.

A word about methodology is in order. This book is not based on a single research project or dataset. It synthesizes findings from a wide range of sources—academic studies, policy reports, journalistic accounts, organizational evaluations, and, where possible, firsthand testimonies from women themselves. The advantage of this approach is breadth; it allows the book to cover a wide range of contexts and to identify patterns that might be invisible in a single case study. The disadvantage is depth; no single study can do justice to the complexity of any particular setting. The book aims to mitigate this trade-off by being transparent about the sources of its claims and by highlighting areas where evidence is thin or contested.

The question of representation is also worth addressing. Writing about women in Islamic societies carries the risk of reinforcing stereotypes—of Muslim women as oppressed, of Islamic economies as backward, of conservative cultures as uniformly hostile to female agency. The book takes this risk seriously and works to counter it by presenting women as complex actors with diverse motivations, constraints, and strategies. It also resists the temptation to measure all contexts against a single standard of progress, recognizing that what counts as empowerment may look different in different places. At the same time, it does not shy away from documenting genuine injustices or from identifying the structural forces that perpetuate them.

The structure of the book reflects its analytical framework. After this introductory chapter, the volume moves through a series of thematic sections that build on each other. The next chapters lay the groundwork by examining the foundations of financial participation in Islamic societies and the historical evolution of gender gaps in capitalist economies. Subsequent sections explore the barriers that women face, the opportunities that are emerging, and the interventions that are being tried. The final sections look forward, considering the conditions under which transformative change is possible and the strategies that can sustain it. Each chapter is designed to stand on its own while contributing to the larger argument.

As the book unfolds, readers will encounter women whose stories illustrate the themes under discussion. A young woman in Jordan who uses a mobile savings app to set aside money for her wedding without her family’s knowledge. A group of women in Senegal who pool their savings through a tontine and invest in a small textile business. A Malaysian entrepreneur who builds a halal cosmetics empire while navigating the expectations of her religious community. These are not representative in a statistical sense; no small number of stories can capture the full range of women’s experiences. But they are illustrative, bringing abstract concepts to life and reminding us that behind every policy debate and market trend are real people making real decisions.

The economic landscape of the twenty-first century is one of both unprecedented opportunity and persistent inequality. Globalization has connected markets and created new pathways for trade, investment, and migration. Technological innovation has lowered barriers to entry in many sectors and created entirely new industries. At the same time, the benefits of these changes have been unevenly distributed, both between and within countries. Women, and particularly women in conservative societies, have often been on the losing side of these distributions. Yet they have also been active agents of change, seizing new opportunities, challenging old constraints, and building new institutions. This book is an effort to understand how that process is unfolding in Islamic markets and what it means for the broader project of women’s economic empowerment.

The stakes are high, not only for the women directly involved but for the societies they inhabit. A growing body of evidence suggests that women’s economic participation is associated with a range of positive outcomes—lower poverty, better health, improved education, more resilient communities. These associations do not prove causation, and the mechanisms linking women’s economic engagement to social outcomes are complex and context-dependent. But the weight of the evidence is sufficient to make the case that excluding women from economic life is not only unjust but also inefficient. Bringing women into Islamic markets, on terms that are fair and sustainable, is therefore not just a matter of rights but of sound economic policy.

At the same time, it is important to maintain a critical perspective. Not all forms of economic participation are empowering, and not all markets are designed to serve the interests of the least powerful. The financialization of everyday life, the rise of precarious work, and the concentration of market power in the hands of a few are global trends that affect women in Islamic societies just as they affect women elsewhere. The book engages with these trends, asking how they interact with local contexts and what can be done to ensure that women’s inclusion in markets leads to genuine empowerment rather than new forms of exploitation.

The chapters that follow will take up these questions in greater depth. For now, it is enough to establish the terrain: a complex, dynamic, and often contradictory landscape in which women, faith, and modern economies intersect in ways that defy simple characterization. The book’s task is to map that landscape with care, to listen to the women who inhabit it, and to draw lessons that are useful for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers alike. It is a task that requires both analytical rigor and a willingness to sit with ambiguity, to resist the comfort of easy answers, and to take seriously the perspectives of those whose lives are most affected by the policies and practices under discussion.

In setting the stage for the chapters ahead, this chapter has introduced the key concepts that will guide the analysis—financial inclusion, empowerment, opportunity structures, and the interplay of formal and informal institutions. It has also flagged some of the tensions and dilemmas that will recur throughout the book: the gap between formal rights and lived realities, the risk of treating Islam as a monolithic force, the challenge of designing interventions that are both effective and respectful, and the need to balance individual agency with structural change. These are not problems to be solved once and for all but ongoing challenges that require sustained attention and creative thinking.

The story of women in Islamic markets is still being written. It is a story of barriers broken and barriers that remain, of opportunities seized and opportunities squandered, of women who have transformed their lives and of systems that have resisted transformation. By examining this story in all its complexity, the book aims to contribute not only to academic understanding but also to the practical work of building more inclusive and equitable economic systems. The chapters that follow are an invitation to engage with that work—critically, constructively, and with an open mind.