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• Dubai International Holy Quran Award 1997 Competition Awards and competitions

  An annual international award and competition for memorising the Qur'an in Dubai, launched in 1418 AH (1997) by order of Muhammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum; it runs an international competition for men, another for women and local competitions, honours an Islamic Personality of the Year, and publishes books in Qur'anic studies.

• Department of Islamic Development Malaysia (JAKIM) 1997 Certifier Enterprise, brands and finance Malaysia

  A Malaysian federal government agency administering Islamic affairs, established on 1 January 1997; it has a Halal Management division, introduced the standardised halal certification logo on 1 October 2003, and serves as secretary of the Malaysian Halal Council, which recognises foreign halal certification bodies.

• Outlandish 1997 Band Music and nasheed Denmark

  A Danish hip-hop group formed in 1997 in Brøndby Strand, first made up of Isam Bachiri and Waqas Ali Qadri, Muslims of Moroccan and Pakistani origin, and the Catholic Lenny Martinez; known for its version of 'Aïcha' and for 'Look into My Eyes' and 'Guantanamo', it played charity concerts with Sami Yusuf and Raihan.

• Rabbani (nasheed group) 1997 Band Music and nasheed Malaysia

  A Malaysian nasheed group founded in Kuala Lumpur on 1 March 1997 with thirteen members led by Mohammed Asri Ibrahim, mixing quasi-traditional nasheed with modern elements; its first album sold more than 90,000 copies, its leader died on 13 August 2009, and it released thirteen studio albums between 1997 and 2016.

• Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank 1997 Company Enterprise, brands and finance United Arab EmiratesEgyptIraq

  An Emirati bank in Abu Dhabi, established as a public joint-stock company by Amiri Decree No. 9 on 20 May 1997, which began commercial operations on 11 November 1998 and carries out all its contracts according to Shari'a principles; it has operations in Egypt, Qatar, Iraq, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, and was 12th on Forbes Middle East's 30 Most Valuable Banks 2025.

• Meezan Bank 1997 Company Enterprise, brands and finance Pakistan

  A Pakistani Islamic bank based in Karachi, founded in 1997 as an Islamic investment bank, Al-Meezan Investment Bank, which became a commercial bank after buying Société Générale's Pakistan operations in 2002; it is Pakistan's largest Islamic bank and its second-largest bank by market capitalisation.

• Turath Publishing 1997 Publisher Books and publishers

  A British publisher established in 1997 in South London by Yahya Batha as a continuation of the work of his father, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Ahmad Batha Bardoli, with the encouragement of Muhammad Taqi Usmani; it began with a five-year project to translate the Muwatta of Imam Muhammad and has over sixty titles of classical translations, contemporary works and manuscripts, including the 2020 edition of Usmani's Qur'an translation.

• Abd al-Aziz al-Ghumari 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Draft card for Abd al-Aziz al-Ghumari, the Moroccan hadith scholar; his entry is not yet checked on the page.

• Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Syrian Hanafi scholar, hadith specialist and critical editor, born in Aleppo in 1917 and died in Riyadh in 1997. He taught at Damascus University and at Saudi universities, and his critical editions of major works of hadith and Hanafi jurisprudence became standard editions in seminaries and universities; he published more than seventy authored and edited works.

• Amin Ahsan Islahi 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Indian, then Pakistani, scholar and exegete (1904–1997) of Bamhur in Azamgarh district, the leading student of Hamiduddin Farahi and the bearer of his method of Qur'anic coherence. He graduated from Madrasatul Islah at Sara-e-Mir in 1922 and worked in journalism, then from 1925 devoted himself to study under Farahi, founded the Daira-i-Hamidiyyah, was a founder member of Jamaat-e-Islami and left it in 1958, completed his Urdu commentary Tadabbur-i-Qur'an in 1980 and died at Lahore.

• Arshad Nadeem 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Pakistani javelin thrower, born in Mian Channu, Khanewal District, Punjab, in 1997. Raised in a poor family and trained as a boy in courtyards and streets, he is the first Pakistani track and field athlete to earn direct Olympic qualification under modern entry standards and the first Pakistani to reach a World Championships final. He took silver at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest and won gold at the Paris 2024 Olympics with a throw of 92.97 metres — a new Olympic and Asian record and the sixth-longest throw in javelin history — becoming Pakistan's first Olympic medallist in athletics and its first individual Olympic gold medallist. He had first breached 90 metres at the 2022 Commonwealth Games (90.18 m), the first South Asian to do so, and received the Pride of Performance (2022) and Hilal-e-Imtiaz (2024) awards.

• Cahit Arf 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Turkish mathematician (1910–1997), born in Thessaloniki and educated in Paris and Göttingen, where he took his PhD under Helmut Hasse in 1938. The Arf invariant, the Hasse–Arf theorem and Arf rings and semigroups bear his name; he was the founding director of TÜBİTAK in 1963, taught at Istanbul University and the Middle East Technical University, and appears on the Turkish ten-lira note of 2009.

• Hamza Choudhury 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  English midfielder of Bangladeshi and Grenadian descent (born 1997 in Loughborough) who came through the Leicester City academy, won the FA Cup with the club in 2021, moved to Sheffield United, and switched his international allegiance from England to Bangladesh in 2025.

• Ismaël Bennacer 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Algerian professional footballer (born 1997 in Arles, France, to a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother). A defensive midfielder who played for Arsenal, Empoli and AC Milan — winning Serie A with Milan in 2022 — he has won over fifty caps for Algeria, won the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations with them and was named that tournament's Player of the Tournament.

• Mahathir Mohamad 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Malaysian politician, physician and author, born in Alor Setar, Kedah, in 1925. He was Malaysia's fourth prime minister (1981–2003) and seventh (2018–2020), 24 years in total — the longest-serving in the country's history — and was titled 'Father of Modernisation' for transforming its economy and infrastructure. He is known for his book The Malay Dilemma (1970) and for steering Malaysia through the 1997 Asian financial crisis with capital controls that defied IMF prescriptions; he came out of retirement to lead the opposition to a historic victory in 2018 at the age of 92. He is still living past the age of one hundred; his wife Siti Hasmah died in 2026 after seventy years of marriage.

• Malala Yousafzai 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Pakistani girls'-education activist and film and television producer, the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history. She began blogging for BBC Urdu under a pseudonym at eleven, survived a Taliban assassination attempt in 2012, then co-founded the Malala Fund, co-authored 'I Am Malala', and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at seventeen.

• Manzoor Nomani 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Indian scholar (1905–1997) of Sambhal, the Deobandi hadith scholar of Maariful Hadith. He graduated from Darul Uloom Deoband in 1927, taught hadith at Nadwatul Ulama for four years, was a founding member and deputy amir of Jamaat-e-Islami before resigning in 1942 and affiliating with the Tablighi Jamaat, and sat on the Majlis-e-Shura of Darul Uloom Deoband and in the Muslim World League.

• Mohamed Chedly Ennaifer 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Draft card for Mohamed Chedly Ennaifer, rector of the Ez-Zitouna Mosque and Tunisian scholar; his entry is not yet checked on the page.

• Muhammad ibn Muhammad Makhluf 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Draft card for Muhammad ibn Muhammad Makhluf, the Algerian scholar and lexicographer; his entry is not yet checked on the page.

• Muhammad Umar Palanpuri 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Draft card for Muhammad Umar Palanpuri, the Indian scholar and Tablighi leader; his entry is not yet checked on the page.

• Musa al-Musawi 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Draft card for Musa al-Musawi, the Iraqi philosopher and thinker; his entry is not yet checked on the page.

• Noussair Mazraoui 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Moroccan professional footballer (born 1997 in Leiderdorp, Netherlands, to Moroccan parents from Tétouan). A defender who came through Ajax's academy, played for Bayern Munich and joined Manchester United in 2024, he has won over fifty caps for Morocco, reached the 2022 World Cup semi-finals with them and won the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations.

• Rodtang Jitmuangnon 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Thai Muay Thai fighter, born Tinnakorn Srisawat in Phatthalung in 1997. Known as The Iron Man, he held the ONE Flyweight Muay Thai World Championship for its longest reign, with five successful defences, compiled 274 wins, and is one of the highest-paid Muay Thai fighters in the world.

• Syed Amjad Ali 1997 Figures of the last fifty years

  Pakistani civil servant and politician (1907–1997), the eldest son of the Lahore businessman Sir Syed Maratib Ali, who sat in the Punjab Legislative Assembly and the Constituent Assembly of India before independence, then served as Pakistan's ambassador to the United States (1953–1955), its third minister of finance (1956–1958) and its permanent representative to the United Nations (1964–1967); his books include the autobiography Glimpses (1992).

• Destiny 1997 Film Films EgyptFrance

  Youssef Chahine's film about Ibn Rushd in Almohad Cordoba on the eve of the burning of his books — a deliberate parallel with 1990s Egypt and religious militancy.

• The Men of Angelos 1997 Series Series and programmes Iran

  Farajollah Salahshour's Iranian series on the People of the Cave — the youths who slept through a pagan empire's persecution; an early Iranian religious drama widely dubbed into Arabic.

• Children of Heaven 1997 Film Films Iran

  Majid Majidi's Iranian film about two poor Tehran children sharing one pair of shoes; among the best-known Iranian films, Oscar-nominated.

• My Son the Fanatic 1997 Film Films United Kingdom

  My Son the Fanatic.

• Leila 1997 Film Films Iran

  Leila.

• Taste of Cherry 1997 Film Films Iran

  Abbas Kiarostami's Palme d'Or winner about a Tehran man seeking someone to bury him if he dies by suicide — its dialogues turn on Islamic arguments over life and death.

• IslamOnline 1997 Website Websites, apps, games and devices

  An Islamic website in Arabic and English launched on 24 June 1997, with Yusuf al-Qaradawi among its founders, owned by the Al-Balagh Cultural Society in Doha while its editorial team worked in Cairo; known for its 'Ask the Scholar' section, it published some 306,000 items from 2000 to 2003, and in March 2010 fell into crisis when its Qatari management decided to move the work to Doha and its Cairo staff staged a sit-in.

• The Qur'an: Saheeh International Translation 1997 Book Books and publishers

  An English rendering of the meanings of the Qur'an made in Jeddah by a team of three American converts: Emily Assami (Umm Muhammad), who led the translation, and Mary Kennedy and Amatullah Bantley, who edited it; first published in 1997 as The Qur'an: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meanings by the Abul-Qasim Publishing House and al-Muntada al-Islami, with a corrected second edition in 2004, it is written in contemporary English with more than two thousand footnotes, and its preface states that it presents the meanings according to the creed of Ahl al-Sunna wa-l-Jama'a.

• Star Rise 1997 Album Music and nasheed

  A remix album from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook's Mustt Mustt and Night Song, released by Real World in 1997 after Khan's death that August and dedicated to his memory; its remixers include Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation and Nitin Sawhney.

• Night Song (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan album) 1996 Album Music and nasheed

  A joint album of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook, recorded at Real World Studios in 1995 and released on 20 February 1996, his last album on the label in his lifetime; it joins qawwali vocals to Brook's ambient production and Senegalese musicians, reached number 4 on Billboard's world albums chart and was nominated for the 1997 Grammy for Best World Music Album.

• Puji-Pujian 1996 Album Music and nasheed

  The debut album of the Malaysian nasheed group Raihan, produced by Farihin Abdul Fattah and released by Warner Music Malaysia between October 1996 and January 1997 with ten songs in Malay; its sources call it the best-selling album in Malaysian history, with more than 750,000 copies there, twelve-times platinum, and double platinum in Singapore.

• Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan 1987 Figures of the last fifty years

  Pakistani qawwal, singer and composer (1948–1997) of the Qawwal Bachon ka Gharana of Delhi, who led his family's party from 1971 and carried qawwali to world audiences through Real World and Peter Gabriel, performed in over forty countries, received the Pride of Performance (1987) and the UNESCO Music Prize (1995), and recorded more than 125 qawwali albums by Guinness's count.

• Mahmud Muhammad Shakir 1984 Figures of the last fifty years

  Egyptian scholar of Arabic, editor and writer (1909–1997), known as Abu Fihr, who developed a 'method of tasting' in literary study; his 'al-Mutanabbi' (1936) caused a stir, he edited sixteen volumes of al-Tabari's Tafsir, 'Tabaqat Fuhul al-Shu'ara' and 'Dala'il al-I'jaz', fought two literary controversies with Taha Husayn and Louis Awad, and received the King Faisal Prize for Arabic Language and Literature (1984).