Every Major Crypto Fatwa, Side by Side

Somebody has sent you a screenshot of a ruling. It has no date, no source, and no indication of what question was actually asked. This is how most Muslims encounter scholarship on cryptocurrency, and it is why the field feels like chaos.

It is not chaos. There are six positions that matter, they are all documented, and once you line them up you can see exactly where they part company. Here they are with their dates and their actual reasoning.

The positions

Mufti Muhammad Abu-Bakar, April 2018. Bitcoin is permissible as customary money. His paper for Blossom Labs, Shariah Analysis of Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain, is the single most cited work on the permissive side. The argument runs through urf, custom: if intangible things like copyrights and trademarks can be mal because society treats them as valuable, so can Bitcoin, since it is desirable, storable in digital wallets, and widely accepted in exchange. He also proposed a three-tier jurisdictional framework, which almost nobody quotes and which is arguably his most useful contribution: where cryptocurrency is government-banned, dealing in it is impermissible; where regulators are silent or cautionary, it is permissible; where regulators have accepted it as a financial asset, it is clearly permissible. Full dossier.

Fiqh Council of North America, 2 September 2019. Bitcoin is essentially halal. The resolution was adopted in Houston, prepared by Dr. Yasir Qadhi and Dr. Abdulbari Mashal. The reasoning invokes al-asl fi'l-ashya' al-ibahah, the maxim that the default in transactions is permissibility, and finds that objections based on anonymity, uncertain future value and lack of government regulation are not strong enough to warrant prohibition. Note the structure of that: it does not claim to prove Bitcoin is wealth. It places the burden on the objection. Full dossier.

Securities Commission Malaysia, Shariah Advisory Council, 29 June and 20 July 2020. Investment and trading of digital assets on registered exchanges is permissible. The SAC classified digital currencies as 'urudh, goods or commodities, rather than as currency, which means they fall outside bai' al-sarf and its requirement of immediate simultaneous delivery. Named permissible assets included Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Chainlink, Litecoin, Ripple and Solana. This is the most consequential ruling of the six and we wrote it up separately. Full dossier.

Shariyah Review Bureau, Bahrain, 2018 onward. Cryptocurrencies can be Shariah-compliant if structured correctly. SRB is licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain as a Shariah advisory firm, and it has certified actual venues, including the Rain and CoinMENA exchanges. Their stated principle is the one this entire site is built on: it would be inaccurate to give one ruling for all cryptocurrencies, and each must be assessed individually. Full dossier.

Mufti Faraz Adam, position evolved across three phases. Crypto-assets with lawful utility are mal and property. What makes his work valuable is that he changed his mind in public. After industry feedback and further research he moved to holding, on DarulFiqh.com, that Bitcoin is in the ruling of a currency: "They will be a currency as long as people use and exchange them." His mature framework rests on al-urf al-khass, the custom of a specific community rather than of society at large, which is a narrower and more defensible route than general urf. Full dossier.

Mufti Taqi Usmani, statement dated 10 May 2021. The most prominent dissent, from a former Supreme Court judge on Pakistan's Shariat Appellate Bench and former Vice President of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy. His position is that cryptocurrency does not qualify as mal, and that it is mostly used speculatively. His own words: "For now, we are not satisfied with it... Personally, I won't recommend it. Rather it seems to be impermissible in principle. However, it could happen that in the future, its use may expand for real trade and we might have to revisit the current decision." Full dossier.

Where they actually diverge

Five permissive positions and one prohibitive one, and the split is not about riba, gambling or volatility. Every one of these scholars would prohibit a lending protocol and a perpetual futures venue. There is no disagreement there at all.

The entire disagreement is the property question. Does mal require tangibility, or does urf expand it to include things society treats as wealth?

Mufti Taqi Usmani applies the narrow tangibility requirement. Abu-Bakar, Faraz Adam and the SAC apply urf, by three different routes. FCNA sidesteps the question by putting the burden on the objector. That is the whole map, and it is why the property question is the one worth understanding rather than the ones people argue about.

Four things the screenshots leave out

They are answering different questions. "Is Bitcoin mal" and "may I trade digital assets on a registered Malaysian exchange" are not the same question, and neither is "should a Muslim speculate on tokens." A ruling on one is routinely circulated as a ruling on all three.

Two of them are explicitly conditional. Abu-Bakar's framework makes the ruling depend on your jurisdiction's regulatory stance, which means the same asset can be permissible in Malaysia and impermissible where it is banned. SRB's principle makes it depend on the specific asset. Neither is a blanket verdict, and both get quoted as if they were.

The dissent is explicitly provisional. Mufti Taqi Usmani said "for now" and named the condition that would cause a revisit: expansion into real trade rather than speculation. Circulating his ruling without that clause misrepresents him, and it happens constantly.

A fatwa is a scholar's considered opinion, not legislation. This is worth stating plainly and there is an existing piece on it. Multiple qualified scholars reaching different conclusions on a novel question is the tradition working normally, not a crisis.

What none of them did

Here is the gap, and it is the reason this site exists.

Not one of these positions tells you whether Aave is permissible, or Hyperliquid, or a tokenized money market fund holding Treasury bills. They could not have. Aave did not exist when Abu-Bakar wrote in 2018. Perpetual futures on a Layer 1 with automated token buybacks did not exist when the SAC met in 2020. Ethena's synthetic dollar, which holds its peg by shorting perpetuals, did not exist when Mufti Taqi Usmani issued his statement.

What the scholars gave us is the framework: the property test, the prohibition on riba, the prohibition on maysir, the treatment of custom, and the AAOIFI thresholds. What they could not give us is the application to ten thousand assets that arrive faster than any council can convene.

That application is fact-finding, and it is what our methodology and our 91 published verdicts are attempting. We are not issuing fatwas and we do not have a Shariah board. We are trying to establish what a protocol actually does so that the frameworks above can be applied to it, and there is an honest account of how that works and where it fails.

How to use this page

When someone sends you a ruling, ask three questions. Who, when, and on what precise question. If the screenshot cannot answer all three, it is not evidence of anything.

And if you want to take a real question to a scholar, do not ask whether crypto is halal. Nobody can answer that. Ask about a mechanism: this protocol earns a third of its revenue from funding rates and uses almost all of it to buy back the token, what do you think. That question has an answer, and every one of the six scholars above is equipped to give you a good one.

All six dossiers with their full text and citations are at /fatwas.