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In the financial world, Muslims’ religious tenets are often tested. From left are Naiel Iqbal, who works for a hedge fund; Ali Akbar, of RBC Capital Markets; and Aisha Jukaku, a financial consultant.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

April 14, 2012

NAIEL IQBAL’S co-workers couldn’t figure him out.

He’d just started at a Midtown Manhattan hedge fund — the kind of elite enclave where overachievers in button-downs go to make a few hundred grand before heading off to Harvard Business School. But Mr. Iqbal, 27, a graduate of the Wharton School, wasn’t acting like a typical finance guy. He didn’t introduce himself around the office. Nor did he grab lunch with the other traders.

In fact, he didn’t eat at all. Or drink. Not coffee, not soda, not even a sip of water from a Nalgene bottle on his desk. All day, he just sat there, staring into his Bloomberg terminal. Was he sick? Nervous? A modern Bartleby?

None of the above: It was Ramadan, and Mr. Iqbal, a Muslim, was exhausted from fasting daily till sundown.

“I’m actually a huge foodie,” he recalls with a laugh. “When Ramadan ended, I was, like: ‘Guys, let’s go to this restaurant! Let’s go to that one!’ Nobody had seen that side of me.”

Mr. Iqbal — who doesn’t drink or smoke — is among a growing number of young Muslims who are disrupting Wall Street’s old-boy culture. Seen from a certain angle, the Street can still look like a monolith — a cohort of white males with Ivy League degrees and Roman numerals attached to their names. (This is especially true the higher you look; there are, for example, no black, female or openly gay chief executives at the nation’s largest banks.)

But as the Street adapts to greater regulation, lower profits and tighter costs, it is also experiencing change within its ranks. Among entry-level financiers, especially, a years-long recruiting effort at major banks has resulted in a diverse group of aspiring Masters of the Universe.

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