Calling Mufti Taqi Usmani an idiot because you disagree with his fatwa is wrong. Treating every blockchain token, Bitcoin, USDT, a pump-and-dump meme coin and a regulated digital asset as if computer science created one identical financial object is also intellectually lazy. Wrong.
And this is precisely where Pakistan’s latest crypto argument has collapsed.
One camp is abusing one of the Muslim world’s best-known Islamic finance scholars as if a torrent of Gen Z profanity constitutes a rebuttal. The other camp is treating the word fatwa as a command to switch off every technical, monetary and jurisprudential question that follows. Between the two sits a serious issue involving mal, gharar, money, ownership, digital scarcity, stablecoin reserves, fiat currency and the future architecture of payments.
I am not issuing a fatwa here. I am asking a more technical question: are the economic and computer-science premises being used to classify every cryptocurrency as the same thing actually strong enough?
That question matters because Pakistan is no longer discussing crypto from a university seminar room. Pakistan ranked third in Chainalysis’s 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, behind India and the United States, using a methodology covering 151 countries and several forms of on-chain activity. Crypto.com’s own industry market-sizing exercise estimated global cryptocurrency ownership at 741 million people in 2025, although that figure should be understood as a corporate research estimate rather than a census of independently verified humans.
This is no longer a discussion about ten nerds mining imaginary coins in a basement.
It is a question Pakistan has already walked into.
What Mufti Taqi Usmani’s Reported Crypto Fatwa Actually Says
The viral headline was brutally simple: Pakistan’s top mufti declares crypto trading haram.
According to the July 9 ProPakistani report, the ruling was issued in June 2026 and circulated by scholars affiliated with Darul Uloom Karachi. The report says its scope includes cryptocurrencies, crypto tokens and stablecoins such as USDT, and presents the fundamental conclusion as: “Cryptocurrency is not considered wealth.”
Read that carefully.
The heart of this dispute is not Bitcoin’s price.
It is not whether a teenager lost his savings on a dog coin.
It is not even, at the primary classification stage, whether speculation is haram.
The first question is far more fundamental:
Is a cryptocurrency mal — legally cognisable wealth or property under Islamic jurisprudence — at all?
If the answer is no, the rest of the structure begins collapsing automatically because, under that analysis, you are supposedly exchanging recognised money for something that does not qualify as wealth.
That is the hinge.
And this is exactly why shouting, “Bitcoin is digital gold, boomer!” proves nothing. Equally, merely repeating, “It has no physical body, therefore it is not wealth,” does not close a centuries-old jurisprudential discussion about the definition of mal in an age of dematerialised assets.
The real dispute in one table
| Question | Reported blanket-fatwa position | Alternative Shariah analysis | Technical and economic issue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is crypto mal? | Crypto is not recognised wealth | Digital assets may qualify as mal where value, exchangeability and recognised rights exist | Does physical form determine property status? |
| Must wealth be tangible? | Tangibility is central to the classification used | Majority-school definitions may recognise economically valued non-physical rights/assets | Modern finance contains dematerialised property |
| Does “no backing” invalidate an asset? | Lack of authority or recognised backing is a concern | Not every asset derives value from an issuing sovereign | Bitcoin, stablecoins and utility tokens have different value structures |
| Does volatility create gharar? | Extreme uncertainty supports impermissibility concerns | Normal commercial risk is distinct from excessive gharar | Asset-by-asset risk differs radically |
| Are USDT and Bitcoin identical? | Both fall within the prohibited digital-asset category | A reserve-backed stablecoin and decentralised scarce token require separate analysis | Issuer, reserves, redemption and network architecture differ |
| Is crypto trading gambling? | Speculation is a major concern | Leverage, futures and pump schemes may differ from spot ownership | The contract and activity may matter as much as the asset |
Claim: The crypto-halal debate cannot be intelligently resolved until scholars first settle which definition of mal they are applying and why.
That is not a disrespectful statement.
That is literally the jurisprudential question.
