🇺🇸🦄 Double-exit Muslim unicorn founders help new generation

In a week where Syria swapped out its bank notes and replaced the Assads with oranges and olives, and the governor of New York lit up sixteen landmarks in green to honor the heritage of the state’s Muslim American community, Musletter is battling football overload and related eyestrain and getting ready for, well, more football.

Here’s what we have for you in this edition:

Plus: Our weekly recommendations on what to read, watch, and buy!

Let’s jump right in!

🇺🇸 Muslim American founders pay it forward: Two household-name businesses – sold! It all started at the University of Maryland, with Haroon Mokhtarzada and his two brothers founding DIY website builder webs.com, hitting 50 million users before selling it to Vistaprint for $117.5m. Not bad for starters. Next up, they founded Truebill (now Rocket Money), a financial management platform that helps cancel unused subscriptions (and a lot of other cool stuff), selling it to Rocket Companies in 2021 for $1.27bn. Haroon was only three years old when his parents fled Afghanistan, and today, the Washington, D.C.-based serial entrepreneur and his brothers are angel investors in 100+ startups and help the next generation of entrepreneurs through the Mokhtarzada Hatchery.

💸 Like Wealthsimple, but halal: It’s not the snappiest of titles, but the Manzil Russell Halal USA Broad Market ETF now trades on the Nasdaq under the much shorter MNZL. It all started in Toronto, selling halal mortgages in Canada, but co-founder and CEO Mohamad Sawwaf – whose goal is to build a halal version of online investment management service Wealthsimple – really got things rolling in the U.S. when Manzil acquired Aghaz Investments in 2024. Now, the company joins the likes of Wahed and ShariaPortfolio in offering halal ETFs, with Manzil providing exposure to over 450 large- and mid-cap U.S. companies screened to exclude non-halal activities.

🇹🇷 Türkiye’s big league aerospace exports: Can I interest you in a light attack aircraft? Better move fast, as Türkiye has just secured a $3.03bn export agreement with Spain. The Hürjet aircraft will be produced at Turkish aerospace facilities, with deliveries starting in 2028. But it’s not just cool planes. The package includes advanced pilot training, ground-based simulation, maintenance, and a whole lot more. The Turkish defense industry is booming right now – in 2025, the country’s defense and aerospace sectors broke records with $10.56bn in exports. Now in the league of major global defense exporters (growing 40x since 2002), Türkiye’s main buyers include the EU and NATO.

🇸🇦 KSA stock market open to foreign investors: February 1, 2026, is the date. Saudi Arabia will be making some big changes that mean non-residents will be able to invest directly in the main Saudi market. It’s an effort to attract fresh capital into what is the region’s largest equities market, with the aim of improving liquidity and broadening the investor base. Foreign ownership of Saudi equities stood at over $157bn as of September 2025 – forming a significant part of KSA’s $2.3tr stock market.

🇴🇲 Big reforms to Omani citizenship rules: The Sultanate is making it a whole lot (well, a bit) simpler for foreigners to get citizenship, with the goal of making settling and doing business in the country easier. From 2 February, 2025, the minimum residency requirement for naturalization is reduced from 20 years down to 15. But there’s more: applicants can also spend 90 days (it used to be 60) outside the country without breaking continuous residency requirements. Plus, in the past, citizenship could be taken away if you spent six months outside Oman over a 10-year period – this has been changed to simply being outside Oman for two consecutive years. Phew, got that?

🇸🇦🫶🏻🇹🇷🫶🏻🇵🇰 Islamic world widens defense pact: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are in advanced discussions to expand their defense alliance to include Türkiye. If it happens, it’s a game-changer for the region. The existing pact was signed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan last year and included a mutual defense clause that meant an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all. The three countries already share a number of interests, and even though the U.S. maintains close military ties with all parties, a general sense of uncertainty has helped move the discussions forward.

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