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.
