“Islam-friendly” hotels would not stock alcohol in the guest rooms.

From travel guides to shopping portals, new internet ventures aim to capitalise on the growing: “Muslim lifestyle” market, which is expanding beyond food to include areas such as tourism, fashion and credit cards.

Excluding food, where halal dietary restrictions must be followed, most of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims are content to buy the bulk of their goods and services from conventional suppliers.

A growing minority, however, want to certify more areas of their consumption as religiously permissible – a trend that appears partly due to rising incomes in majority-Muslim areas of the Gulf and southeast Asia, as well as to expanding choices for consumers.

In some ways, the trend resembles the surge of consumption of luxury goods in emerging markets, as newly affluent consumers seek to express their identities partly through what they buy.

For example, Muslim consumers may want to stay in Islam-friendly hotels that ban alcohol, wear fashions that have been specifically designed to meet Muslim ideas of modesty, and use medicines that have been screened to exclude alcohol or gelatine made with banned animal products.

The Muslim lifestyle market is spread across the world, so some firms are trying to cast a wider net by going online. One is Singapore-based CrescentRating, a firm that focuses on the halal travel market.

Muslim consumers spent an estimated $140 billion on travel and tourism in 2013

“This is a very fragmented industry of largely offline transactions, with no real major players. It is in a prime position from an entrepreneurial point of view,” said chief executive Fazal Bahardeen.

Travel is one area of opportunity; Muslim consumers spent an estimated $140 billion on travel and tourism in 2013, according to New York-based DinarStandard, a research firm specialising in Muslim markets.

Nobody knows how much of that spending was self-consciously “Islamic”; the vast majority was probably not. But even if one per cent of spending went towards halal products and services, that was a sizeable amount.

CrescentRating has developed a travel index with MasterCard that ranks “Muslim-friendly” holiday destinations and is releasing a mobile application for its travel portal, HalalTrip.com.

Its criteria include access to halal food and places of worship, and the option of having no alcohol in hotel room minibars.

In June, MasterCard launched a sharia-compliant debit card with Malaysia's Lembaga Tabung Haji, a body which manages funds for Muslims to perform their pilgrimages to Mecca.

Obstacles to such projects include a lack of consensus on what is halal and the costs of hiring scholars to certify things as halal. But regional trading hubs in halal goods and mutual recognition of standards are reducing ambiguity, a source said.