Why Demographics Fail to Predict Islamic Banking Adoption: Attitudinal Mediation Evidence from Tanzania

Purpose: Decades of Islamic banking adoption literature have treated demographic characteristics - age, gender, education, income, occupation and banking experience, as direct predictors of adoption behaviour. This study shows that this assumption does not hold once customer attitude is accounted for: education and banking experience, the only demographic predictors that achieve significance in isolation, lose their explanatory power entirely once the psychological mechanism through which they operate enters the model. The study tests whether demographic effects on Islamic banking adoption are in fact distal, operating only through customer attitude as the proximal driver of adoption behaviour. Design/methodology/approach: Hierarchical binary logistic regression was applied to 375 retail banking customers across four conventional banks operating Islamic windows in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Block 1 contained eight demographic control variables; Block 2 added the composite attitude score. A qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended responses from all 375 respondents provided mechanism-level explanation for the quantitative mediation pattern. Findings: Education and banking experience are significant predictors in the demographics-only model but lose all significance once the composite attitude score enters the model, confirming full attitudinal mediation. Gender, age, income, occupation, marital status and ethnicity are non-significant in both blocks. Qualitative evidence identifies two mediation pathways: education cultivates cognitive-informational attitudinal formation; banking experience cultivates institutional-functional trust evaluation. Originality/value: This is the first study to demonstrate full attitudinal mediation of demographic effects in a window-based dual banking system, repositioning demographics from direct adoption predictors to distal antecedents operating through the proximal attitudinal mechanism. The finding has direct implications for Islamic banking marketing strategy and financial inclusion policy across Tanzania and comparable Sub-Saharan African dual banking markets.