Muslims Flex Their Market Muscle

June 25 -- The struggle to win the hearts and minds of Muslims around world has been on the lips of Westerners a lot lately, but there's a parallel battle that has been fought for a long time: the one for its pocketbooks.

The influence of the Muslim consumer is felt in nearly every nation around the globe: multinationals like Pizza Hut have established bases in Yemen and Pakistan, while Halal butcher shops, which serve meat that has been prepared according to the standards of Islamic law, are found throughout the world.

The purchasing power of U.S. Muslims alone is $12 billion yearly, according to the New York-based Center for American Muslim Research and Information.

"There are six to eight million Muslims in the United States," Rasheed Ahmed, with the non-profit Muslim Consumer Group, told ABCNEWS. "There is a lot of potential there."

There is some disagreement over the U.S. Muslim population — others put the figure at 2 million — but considering Islam is the world's second-most popular religion, with some 1.2 billion adherents, the potential profit for those marketing to the Islamic world is huge, including for American firms.

But experts warn that there are also considerable obstacles for those interested in marketing to Muslims.

American companies appealing to overseas Muslims have to contend with growing resentment among their target audience.

Some Muslims believe American firms already dominate too much of the market, while others have chosen to forego American goods in response to Washington's perceived anti-Islamic actions in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks or the United States' association with Israel.

The plight of the Palestinians is one of the foremost concerns among Muslims of all kinds, from Shiites to Sunni, from Gulf Arabs to Southeast Asians, said Raeed Tayeh, of American Muslims for Global Peace and Justice.

Bring in the Replacements

For some Muslim-run companies, that resentment has helped expand their markets.

Zamzam Cola, an Iranian soft drink that was invented as a replacement for U.S. soft drinks after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, recently hit the shelves in Bahrain in response to growing anti-U.S. sentiment.