Is crypto even property in Islam?
This is the question sitting underneath every other crypto ruling, and most arguments online are really about it without ever saying so.
What mal means
In fiqh, mal is recognised property: something that can be owned, held, and validly bought and sold. If a thing is not mal, then no sale of it is valid, however clean the rest of the arrangement looks.
Scholars debated the edges of this category for centuries before Bitcoin existed. Can you sell a right of way? An unborn calf? Water still running in a river? The boundary has always needed argument.
The case against
Mufti Taqi Usmani, among the most respected voices in modern Islamic finance, ruled cryptocurrency impermissible, and this is the point he turned on.
His position: money in Shariah is either a commodity with intrinsic worth, like gold and silver, or something a state has made legal tender. Bitcoin is neither. It has no physical existence and no use outside its own trading, so what people exchange is a number, and the price is pure speculation.
If you accept that, no amount of clean tokenomics rescues any of it.
The case for
The counter position holds that mal was never defined by physical substance. It is defined by taqawwum, whether a society treats the thing as valuable and is willing to trade for it.
By that test the answer changed somewhere in the last fifteen years. Crypto is now held by hundreds of millions of people, priced continuously, accepted by businesses, taxed by governments and recognised by regulators. Whatever it was in 2010, it is demonstrably treated as wealth today.
Malaysia's Shariah Advisory Council took this route in 2020, classifying digital assets as commodities rather than currency. That single reclassification resolved the hardest problem in the field, because a commodity does not need to be legal tender to be validly owned and sold.
Where that leaves you
Both positions come from serious scholarship, and neither is fringe.
ShariaQuant works from the second one, and says so openly rather than pretending the matter is settled. If you follow the first, the honest conclusion is that this asset class is closed to you, and no screener changes that.
In one line: the real disagreement is not about riba, it is about whether a digital asset is property at all.
Genuinely disputed between serious scholars. We work from the position that crypto is mal, and say so rather than claiming a consensus that does not exist.
Is crypto mal? The question behind every verdict