This paper argues that the Malaysian state has developed Islamic nance in conjunction with two distinct strategies of subject formation. In its initial phase, beginning in the early 1980s, a central goal was the nancial inclusion of Malays: incorporating this disadvantaged indigenous majority into the modern economy. By the 2000s the state’s goal of fostering an indigenous Malay Muslim middle class had been largely achieved through aggressive armative action policies. Today Islamic nance is being redeployed as a means for the entrepreneurialization of the Malay Muslim population. Empirically this shift is evident in recent eorts by experts seeking to move Islamic nance away from a reliance on what they call “debt-based” instruments to the use of ones that they refer to as “equity-based.” In brief, this entails a move away from instruments and structures that reformers assert “replicate” the loan instruments characteristic of “conventional nance” and toward instruments based on partnership, “prot sharing,” and “risk sharing” that they contend are more true to Islamic history and discourse. The paper concludes that eorts to reformulate Islamic nance around equity rather than debt oers an alternative solution to the way the predicament of nance has been characterized in the human sciences today.