Pakistan Itself Is Exploring Stablecoins While This Debate Is Happening
Now the Pakistani contradiction becomes almost theatrical.
In January 2026, Pakistan signed an agreement with an affiliate of World Liberty Financial to explore the use of the dollar-pegged USD1 stablecoin for cross-border payments. The Nation reported the agreement, and the widely circulated signing photograph shows Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb and Zach Witkoff at the table while Pakistan’s political and military leadership stands behind them.
Al Jazeera later reported a crucial qualification: as of early July, Pakistani officials said there had been no USD1 pilot project, no licences issued and no known transactions through the stablecoin. The MoU remained exploratory.
That distinction matters.
The agreement does not prove USD1 is useful.
Government interest does not prove a product is Shariah compliant.
A photograph with the prime minister does not turn a smart contract halal.
But Pakistan’s state is clearly investigating digital assets at a policy and payments level while one of Pakistan’s most influential Islamic finance voices is reported to have categorically excluded cryptocurrencies, tokens and stablecoins from mal.
This is a fatwa-policy collision Pakistan cannot solve through memes.
Pakistan needs a national digital-assets Shariah working group involving scholars from more than one fiqhi methodology, State Bank monetary experts, Islamic banking practitioners, cryptographers, distributed-systems engineers, cybersecurity specialists, AML investigators, economists and reserve auditors.
Not a television shouting match.
Not four crypto bros explaining blockchain to a mufti in fifteen minutes.
Not a beard versus blue-tick Twitter war.
Actual multidisciplinary ijtihad.
And Before Crypto Bros Celebrate: Most of You Are Exactly Why Scholars Are Suspicious
Now let me annoy the other side.
I have been warning people about financial scams for years.
In my older guide on Forex, binary trading and investment scams, the central warning was embarrassingly simple: if somebody can double money every week, why the hell does he need your money?
That warning has aged beautifully.
Crypto did not eliminate the conman.
It gave him Telegram.
It gave him a referral code.
It gave him an offshore exchange.
It gave him a token generator.
It gave him a Lamborghini reel, a rented watch and the phrase “Alhamdulillah 40X”.
The social-media criticism that exchanges, influencers and useless tokens have repeatedly left ordinary users poorer cannot simply be dismissed as clerical ignorance. Global adoption statistics do not establish moral legitimacy, investment quality or Shariah compliance. Crypto.com’s estimate of 741 million owners shows scale; it does not show that 741 million people made money or purchased legitimate assets.
Likewise, Chainalysis ranking Pakistan third in global grassroots adoption demonstrates usage, not prudence.
A rug pull is not redeemed by blockchain.
A pump-and-dump does not become entrepreneurship because the liquidity pool is decentralised.
A 100x leveraged futures position is not suddenly sensible because the trader says Bismillah before clicking “long”.
A token whose only economic proposition is finding a bigger idiot may be technically tradable and still contain the exact gharar, deception and speculative excess Islamic finance is meant to confront.
And my older Forex article requires one important EEAT clarification here as well. Its broad sentence describing “Forex and other CFDs” as halal was too loose to function as a universal Shariah ruling. The scam warnings remain valid, but a contract must be examined contract by contract: ownership, leverage, interest, overnight financing, settlement, possession and derivative structure can change the analysis.
That is how serious financial writing should evolve.
You update weak wording.
You do not worship your old paragraph.
Speculation Is Haram? Then Define Speculation Properly
Another slogan repeatedly circulating is: “Speculation is haram.”
Fine.
Define it.
A farmer stores wheat because he expects a higher price next month. A property investor buys land because he expects infrastructure development. A PSX investor purchases shares expecting earnings growth. A central bank holds foreign assets based upon projected reserve needs. Every future-directed commercial decision contains uncertainty.
Islam does not ban the existence of an uncertain future.
The jurisprudential concern is excessive gharar, deception, qimar, unlawful subject matter and contractual defects.
This is why saying “Bitcoin is volatile, therefore haram” creates an incomplete argument. Volatility may contribute to risk analysis, and extreme uncertainty may become jurisprudentially relevant, but normal commercial risk and prohibited excessive gharar are not automatically synonyms.
The Malaysian SAC’s regulatory position is instructive precisely because it screens digital assets rather than presuming every token has an identical Shariah character. Its current digital-assets framework even lists specific Shariah-compliant digital currencies, and from March 30, 2026, operators seeking to offer Shariah-compliant digital currencies are required to obtain SAC endorsement.
That is a fundamentally different methodology.
Screen the asset. Screen the rights. Screen the underlying activity. Screen the trading mechanism.
I find that approach intellectually more convincing than placing Bitcoin, USDT and “ElonDogTrumpMoonInu” into one digital bucket and closing the file.
That remains my opinion.
It is not a fatwa.
