Malaysia Has Already Reached a Different Shariah Conclusion on Mal
Here is the part Pakistani social media shouting matches conveniently miss.
The Shariah Advisory Council of the Securities Commission Malaysia has formally considered whether regulated digital assets can constitute mal. Its 233rd and 234th meetings in 2020 resolved that digital currency can be recognised as mal from a Shariah perspective, while digital tokens can also be recognised as mal under the category of urudh. The Council further distinguished between technology-based digital currencies with no underlying asset and digital currencies backed by gold, silver, currency or other ribawi items. For assets satisfying its regulatory and Shariah conditions and traded on a registered digital asset exchange, the Council found investment and trading permissible.
This does not prove Mufti Taqi Usmani wrong.
It proves something much more inconvenient for headline warriors:
There is a substantive Shariah classification dispute.
The Malaysian SAC even records the majority-scholar formulation of mal as something possessing value, capable of being traded and giving rise to compensation if damaged. That is materially different from treating physical tangibility as the unavoidable gateway into the concept of wealth.
This is also the dispute explored in the Darul Fiqh analysis of Shariah interpretations of Bitcoin, while the more recent CoinStudy scholarly response argues that a broad Hanafi classification should not automatically be used to erase other established juristic conceptions of mal.
Again, pause.
One may reject those conclusions.
One may say their analogy is defective.
One may demonstrate that Bitcoin fails another Shariah test.
But “Mufti Sahib said it” is not an academic response to another Shariah institution saying, in a formal resolution, that digital currency can be mal.
Bring the dalil.
Bring the usul.
Bring the economic model.
Bring the protocol engineers.
That is how a civilisation confident in its religion should investigate a genuinely new asset class.
