Why a Muslim Bitcoin Summit?
I know what you might be thinking. A Muslim Bitcoin summit? Why on earth do we need one of those? Why is Bitcoin of any specific concern to Muslims, and why would we need our own dedicated event for it? And right behind that question, a sharper one: is this just someone using the label of Islam — preying on our faith — to pull us into a scam?
If that’s where your mind went, good. You’re right to be cautious. An unfortunate association with the broader “crypto” space has set us back a bit when it comes to understanding Bitcoin as Muslims: the coins, the tokens, the get-rich-quick schemes, the hustlers who dress a scam in religious language to separate believers from their money (you’ll have noticed many “projects” like this popping up lately, intentionally named to try and draw Muslims in). Be sceptical of all of it. I know I am.
But here is my answer to your question, and I’ll spend the rest of this piece making the case for it. There is a real reason this summit exists, and it has nothing to do with any of that. Muslims face specific problems, ones most of us have been living with our whole lives without ever being shown their shape. And Bitcoin, whatever you’ve been told it is, turns out to be a specific solution to those exact problems. That is the whole reason for a Muslim Bitcoin summit. It is not about the price and it is not about the hype. Nobody is trying to sell you their coin. These are problems that are uniquely ours, and there exists an answer to them.
So let me start by showing you these problems, of which you’ve almost certainly experienced the symptoms — if not directly, then indirectly — without ever being shown the cause.
Take a look around you. A home is out of reach without a mortgage. A car, without finance. An education, without a loan. Almost anything that you should reasonably expect to be able to attain in life now arrives with the same default payment mechanism attached, which is to borrow, and to pay interest on it for years. Riba is the thing our scriptures warn against more severely than almost anything else, yet somehow the entire structure of modern life has been arranged so that avoiding it means going without the basics. You’ve almost certainly noticed this reality. You may have wondered why doing the right thing has become so expensive.
But the even more uncomfortable truth is this: the riba isn’t only in the mortgage, or the loan, or the credit card agreement — things you could choose to avoid at some personal sacrifice. It’s in the money itself.
Let’s start from the beginning with an explanation you may have heard before, but the importance of which cannot be overstated. Every pound in your bank account, or wallet, was created as debt, essentially lent into existence, at interest, by a bank that didn’t even possess it a moment before. This is literally how the system functions. You don’t need to take my word for it either. Central banks around the world are proud to tell you of this fantastic innovation of theirs, in published papers, for everyone to see[1][2]. Which means that in today’s world, you don’t just deal with riba when you sign a loan, as part of some conscious decision. You’re already dealing with it in your daily life, every time you earn, every time you save, every time you pay your taxes. We are all participating in it without consent. And to be clear, that is not a criticism of you. You were born into this money, but you had no say in it. It’s just the shape of the water we’re all swimming in, and most of us have never once been shown its shape.
So far, two things. The money we use is born as debt, with riba baked in at the very moment it is created. And almost everything you need — a home, a car, an education — can now only be acquired by taking on debt of your own. What we haven’t joined up yet is why the first makes the second unavoidable.
It’s not by accident, and not because of any single bad actor. It is a design feature of the global monetary system. Consider that when money is lent into existence at interest, the interest owed doesn’t yet exist, since it was never created. The only way to find it is to issue still more debt and more riba. The supply has to keep expanding, forever, or the whole structure caves in on itself in a wave of defaults.
This is why this system can never allow prices to fall for an extended period of time. Falling prices (which should be the natural result of us getting better and more productive at making things) would trigger the collapse of a system that is built on layers of debt. Think about what falling prices (known as deflation) would do to that debt: every loan is a promise to repay a greater sum in the future, so if money were gaining value, that promise would grow heavier every year, until borrowers everywhere — but mainly governments, the most reckless borrowers of all — buckled under debts that only got harder to carry. Inflation basically does the reverse. It quietly shrinks the real cost of what is owed, so yesterday’s debt is always a little easier to repay tomorrow. At least, for those who borrow on the right terms, which, as we will shortly see, is not you and me.
The system does not inflate by mistake. It inflates because the mountain of debt it sits on can only remain standing if the money underneath it is forever losing value. So it must inflate, forever. And it is that endless rise in prices that drags the ordinary things, like a home, or a car, or an education, etc., onto borrowed money, because fewer and fewer of us can reach them by saving alone. Rising prices are not a fault in the machine; they are the exhaust fumes of the riba fuel it runs on.
So, to recap what we’ve established: money that comes into existence as debt forces prices to rise, endlessly, and pushes every part of ordinary life onto borrowed money. Once you understand these mechanics, you can also begin to understand who is punished and who is rewarded by such a system.
If money loses value every year, then holding or saving in it is a slow loss, whilst owing it is a hidden gain. The person who is able to leverage up and take on debt benefits from the value of that debt eroding over time, whilst the things they purchase or investments they make with the borrowed funds hold or increase their worth in real terms. So the rational move, even for someone who needs not… is to borrow. Debt stops being a last resort and becomes the go-to strategy. Saving becomes a mug’s game where you have to earn your money twice, once to make it and again to outrun its debasement.
And it turns out that the ones best placed to play this game are those who already own the most, or the ones with assets to pledge as collateral. They borrow at the cheapest rates, turn that borrowed money into hard assets, or lend it back out to those with less at higher rates, capturing the spread between the two. And this is the part that must not be misunderstood: this advantage exists for those who can borrow below the true rate at which the money is being debased. Governments can, at rates they themselves have a hand in setting. The largest corporations can. You cannot. The rate you are charged on a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card is set deliberately above expected inflation, because that is precisely how the lender secures himself a real return. So you carry the debasement and a premium on top of it, while your wages trail behind the prices in the shops. Do not mistake this for a system that forgives your debts. It forgives theirs, and it bills you for the privilege. New money reaches the asset-rich first and the rest of us last, so the gap widens with every turn of the cycle.
And it doesn’t stop with individuals; it reshapes every business too. Companies stop competing on who serves the customer best and start competing on who can borrow cheapest, and then on who can turn their own customers into borrowers. Look around the British high street: your supermarket runs a bank, your department store issues its own credit card, and even the company that fixes your car by the roadside will happily offer you a loan. Layer upon layer, the whole economy turns into a game of riba, lending and skimming the difference. Before it collapsed, the American department store Macy’s was earning more from the interest on its store cards than from selling the clothes on its shelves. That is what an economy becomes once riba digs its claws into the foundations: at every level, everyone is conscripted into it, whether they chose it or not.
I hope by now that it’s becoming clear why this matters to us. Interest is no longer something a careful Muslim can stay clear of at the edges. It has been built into the base of the money, and from the base it seeps into everything priced in that money, which is everything. Understand that interest is not some sin waiting at the door of the bank. It is the air which we breathe. That is what it means to say the riba is in the money itself.
Now let’s look deeper into the effects of all of this, and why it lands on Muslims in a way it lands on no one else. Not because we are the only ones trapped inside this system; everyone is. But most of the world is content inside it. It is comfortable with debt, with interest, with living for the now. We are not, and we cannot be, because so much of it runs directly against what we believe and are striving to be. The system doesn’t merely make us poorer. It quietly dismantles the institutions our deen commands us to uphold. And here, perhaps, you begin to feel why riba is condemned so severely in Islam, and why it is the one sin over which Allah (swt) and His Messenger (pbuh) declare war. Look at what it does once we stop rejecting it as we were commanded. It does not stay a single transaction at the edge. It seeps into everything, and rots the structures our Ummah was built upon.
Islam asks us to live with our eyes on what lasts. To weigh the akhirah above the fleeting life, to defer, to sacrifice now for later, to build for those who come after us. The students of economics have a plainer name for that same disposition: low time preference, the willingness to forego something today (be it a satisfaction, pleasure, or consumption) for something greater tomorrow. As Muslims, this is the compass we are taught to follow in all our pursuits. It is the DNA of the institutions we were commanded to uphold. And this is precisely what a debasing money destroys.
When your savings melt in your hand as you desperately try to maintain your grip, the rational response is to grab what you can now. Spend before prices climb more, consume today with little regard for tomorrow, focus on your own survival with no thought for others, and constantly discount a future you can no longer rely on. A whole society tilted that way stops building things to last. In the worst cases it is stark: people in collapsing currencies chop down fruit-bearing trees for firewood, eating the seed corn of their own future. In the west, it’s subtler: a grand old library built to stand for centuries, replaced by a modern eyesore that needs rebuilding in forty years. But for us, wherever we are, it manifests itself in the erosion of institutions that our Ummah upheld for centuries.
Let’s start with the one we all know first-hand: the family. It is easy to treat family as something private, sitting outside economics, but in Islam it is one of the load-bearing institutions of the entire social order. It sits among the five things the Sharia exists to protect: faith, life, intellect, family and wealth. And the Quran built an economic structure around it, with the husband charged as provider, inheritance carefully apportioned to widow and children, and the near relative and the orphan given the first claim on our wealth. Where the modern state established welfare offices, Islam reached for the family. Care for your parents in their old age, raise your own children, and provide for your kin. It was more than just a household, it was also a system of welfare, wealth distribution and charity, all at once.
Now a look at what a debasing money does to that precious institution. When a single income can no longer outrun prices that never stop climbing, both parents are forced into full-time work simply to tread water, children raised by a morally devoid state rather than by their own mother and father, the patient generational work of a household sacrificed to the daily scramble. And the care of parents in old age — a duty Allah (swt) placed directly upon us, not upon any institution — becomes something a household running two full-time jobs can barely find the hours to give. Our communities have carried this better, and for longer, than most around us. But the squeeze does not relent, and eventually it becomes unsustainable even for us[5]. Into every void created in the household, the state steps, its influence growing as the family’s shrinks.
And what is handed over in that exchange is not simply a chore. It is an act of worship: the reward attached to raising your own children, to honouring your parents, to providing for your kin, all surrendered for a service delivered by a bureaucracy, in place of a duty that was always meant to be carried by the family and the community around it. This is not culture simply drifting, or a people mysteriously losing their values; it is the Islamic family being made, quite literally, monetarily impossible. The system doesn’t just take our money. It pulls us, by the pocket, toward the exact disposition we were commanded to resist. And it dissolves, one household at a time, the first building block of a prospering Ummah.
Then there is the Waqf. Its absence in our vocabulary alone should tell us just how much we have actually lost. For most of our history, the Muslim world ran its welfare through these endowment structures: a person would dedicate land or wealth, in perpetuity, to serve the community. The Ottoman Awqaf were so complete that a person could be born in a Waqf-funded hospital, sleep in a Waqf-funded cradle, be taught in a Waqf-funded school, drink from Waqf-funded fountains, and finally be buried at the Waqf’s expense, cradle to grave, with no state and no taxation behind any of it. But the whole model rests on one thing, which is sound money. The entire function of a Waqf is to take the stored fruits of one person’s life and let them serve strangers for centuries. And you cannot store value for centuries in a money engineered to leak. Only with honest money can you create something of real value once and store its economic powers until they are needed. That is the premise of the Waqf, and it is the premise that a debasing money makes impossible.
The same rot reaches our giving. Zakat is meant to move real wealth to those in need; but on broken money, it decays on the way to them and continues decaying in their hands. The damage runs both ways: as inflation eats the giver’s wealth, he has less to give in real terms, and more of what remains must go to his own rising costs, while whatever he does give keeps losing value in the hands that receive it. The lifespan of charity is squeezed at both ends. On honest money the reverse holds: savings grow, so more can be given, and what is given keeps its worth, so it genuinely alleviates conditions over time. But the damage isn’t only in the numbers. When a family is running flat out just to stay afloat, generosity itself stops coming to mind. The obligatory zakat is paid, if it can be, but the voluntary giving of Sadaqah that our deen prizes so highly is the first thing to fall away. Voluntary generosity is the first casualty of a survival economy. A people held in permanent anxiety about their own provision cannot be the open-handed Ummah we were meant to be.
And it doesn’t stop there. It reaches how we are meant to do business too. Islam’s economic model is one of partnership where investor and trader share the profit and the loss, the way the Sahaba would fund a trading caravan and split what it earned on its return. A financier who shares your risk actually cares whether you succeed; a lender who only wants his interest cares only that he can repossess if you fail. A debt-based economy turns a society of partners into a society of creditors and debtors. Predators and prey. And even Qard Hassan — the simple, beautiful interest-free loan that Allah (swt) encourages us to give — cannot thrive in this system. A loan repaid in full always comes back worth less than when it left, and generosity itself ends up penalised.
It is clear, from following the trail so far and observing the impact on our institutions, that today’s riba-based monetary system is incompatible with Islam at every level.
None of this would have surprised the early Muslims. They built the alternative, showed us the model, and ran it for centuries. And it was never merely a prohibition on riba; it was a complete code for how to trade: full measure, clear contracts, honest dealing, free markets and property respected. The model worked so well that merchants of every faith came to trade in Muslim markets, and it quickly spread across continents, all the way to the furthest western corners of the world. All of it rests on the principle of justice in exchange. And nothing decides justice in exchange more than the honesty of the very thing you exchange in. Give full measure when you measure, and weigh with a balance that is straight (Al-Isra, 17:35). Woe to those who short the scales (Al-Mutaffifin, 83:1–6). Honesty in weights and measures, which is nothing other than honesty in money, is a matter our deen returns to again and again.
The market of Madinah was tax-free, and the Prophet (pbuh), when asked to fix prices, refused, holding that it is Allah who sets prices[3], and leaving them to the honest workings of trade. This was more than a thousand years before Europeans, and Adam Smith[4], even considered such an idea. The gold dinar gave the Muslim world a single sound currency from Spain to Central Asia; capital formed, trade networks deepened, and civilisation compounded on top of a money that held its value and enabled orientation toward the future. The prohibition of riba didn’t leave a void, or prevent economic growth, but rather it forced the invention of something better: the profit-and-loss partnership, the Qirad and the Mudaraba, the world’s first true venture finance, later borrowed by the Venetian commenda that would seed European banking. This is the thread that runs through the whole golden age: for the better part of a millennium, from the Prophet’s (pbuh) Madinah through the Umayyads and the Abbasids, the Muslim world traded, saved, built and gave on money that held its worth. The flourishing and the sound money were not two facts sitting side by side; one rested on the other. Sound, honest money was the soil upon which everything else grew.
And by observing the developments that followed, we can see this is more than just a casual relation. When the soundness of the money went, so did it all. The Ottomans prospered on a sound money standard for centuries; but once they began debasing the silver in the late sixteenth century to pay for their wars, prices roughly quintupled and the unrest followed close behind. By the nineteenth century they were borrowing at interest from European banks; in 1881 they defaulted, and European powers took control of their revenues. The Caliphate was hollowed out by riba and inflation long before it was ever beaten on a battlefield. And the Waqf fell in step with the coin. The same state that had turned to borrowing at interest and debasing its money, now in desperate need of new ways to fund their deficits and centralise control, took aim at the endowments: taxing their surpluses, narrowing who they were allowed to serve, and folding their independent boards into itself. This is the inevitable outcome of a society that goes astray. The Waqf, which fed and taught and healed without a ruler’s permission, had become both a source of revenue to seize and a rival to be removed.
What the late Ottoman state began from within, the colonial powers amplified outward, and for much the same reason. A Waqf is economic sovereignty made concrete. To any power that governs through its grip on money and wealth — whether a state straining to extract every last source of revenue, or an empire imposing control over a conquered people — that kind of independence is a threat to be removed. So wherever the Waqf stood, it was dismantled. Where more than half the land of nineteenth-century India was held in endowment, the British passed an act in 1861 to seize the boards and turn their revenues toward military spending; the French outlawed family endowments in Algeria outright. Institutions that could feed, teach and heal a community without a state were competition for the state. So they had to go. This incompatibility is not something new.
The pattern is impossible to miss. Sound money underwrote the flourishing of our civilisation for centuries; the moment it was abandoned, everything built on top of it began to crumble, first the coin, then the Waqf, then the entire order that depended on both. This is only one thread of the story, but the evidence sits everywhere you care to look, then and now. Our Ummah and its institutions simply cannot function as they were meant to on rotten foundations.
And so we arrive at where we stand today. Our households are squeezed by a system that bills us for its own survival. The family strains under a pressure it was never built to carry. The Waqf, which once fed and taught and healed millions, survives mostly as a word that few of us would even recognise. Our giving is worth less by the year, at both ends of it. The businesses we build are financed by the exact thing we were told to flee. And a people who once invented equity finance now queue for imitations of the thing we abandoned.
Look at what passes for “Islamic finance” now. A “halal” mortgage, a commodity Murabaha, that rearranges the paperwork but leaves you paying what is, to the penny, interest by another name; a Sukuk sold as a bond-that-isn’t, yet priced off the same interest rate it claims to have escaped. None of it is quite what it says it is, and it cannot be. A genuine interest-free loan, a real profit-and-loss partnership, a self-sustaining Waqf cannot be built on money designed to rot. You cannot lay a clean floor on a swamp. So we get the workaround, the wrapper, the Islamic label glued onto the very same fiat engine, pumping its riba emissions into the air we all breathe. The retrofitting is the evidence of everything we have lost.
For anyone who has reached this far, here’s what I want you to understand: the same mechanism draining and exploiting us today is the same one that brought down our civilisations then. Not a different story. The same story, continuing. And the solution today is as it was then. We must go back to what was abandoned.
So why do a growing number of Muslims believe that Bitcoin is the tool which enables us to do that? Not because of a price, and not because it’s cool technology. Because when you hold it up against everything we have just walked through, it answers each piece in turn. Its supply is fixed. Twenty-one million, and no bank, no government, no committee can dilute it at your expense. That is honest weights and measures made into a protocol: the Quran’s command against tampering with the scale, Al-Mutaffifin, expressed as a money that cannot be tampered with. Because it holds its value, saving becomes rational again, the Waqf’s premise becomes possible again, Zakat can reach the poor with its worth intact, and Qard Hassan stops being a penalty on the generous. And because it is not born as debt, there is no riba at its foundation, nothing lent into existence, no interest owed on the very first unit. It doesn’t ask you to be more careful inside a broken system. It is a new system, built on honest, just foundations.
As I mentioned at the start, that natural instinct to be suspicious is the right one; it has simply been aimed at the wrong target. Everything in the “crypto” space has somebody behind it: a founder who can issue more, a foundation that can rewrite the rules, insiders who got there first and need you to buy in. That is what you are right to reject, I reject it too. Bitcoin has none of it. There is nobody to trust because there is nobody in charge, and that, not its price, is the entire point of it. Bitcoin is sound money. The rest are neither sound, nor money.
And whilst I’m sure it’s already quite obvious, I feel I must still say it… I’m not a scholar. I’m a Muslim who learned about Bitcoin, looked at it through the lens of my deen, and couldn’t unsee the connection. I’m not asking you to take my word for any of this. That would be the worst possible reason to believe something this important. I’m asking you to do the thing we’ve largely stopped doing: look for yourself. Ask the hard questions. Bring your objections — the sharper, the better. This is far too important to outsource to a thirty-second soundbite, whether it comes from me or from anyone else.
That is what the Muslim Bitcoin Summit is for.
And it is the real answer to the question you began with. Not because we need a separate room to talk about money, but because the questions that matter most to us are not the ones any other room is built to ask. There are Bitcoin conferences all over the world, and not one of them exists to examine riba at the base of the money, or what became of the Waqf, or whether Zakat can reach the poor with its value intact, or what our own history proves about a civilisation that let go of honest weights and measures. Those questions belong to us. Nobody else is going to ask them on our behalf.
So we are going to ask them properly, over two days in central London on 10–11 October 2026, alongside scholars, people who have spent years studying this, those who worked inside the Islamic finance industry and walked away from it, and Muslims already building the alternative. It is open to everyone: scholar and student, business owner and parent, the curious and the unconvinced alike. Come with your questions. Come to disagree, if that’s where you stand.
You don’t have to be convinced of anything yet. You only have to be willing to look.
References
[1] Bank of England (2014), Money creation in the modern economy, Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1.
[2] Deutsche Bundesbank (2017), The role of banks, non-banks and the central bank in the money creation process, Monthly Report, April 2017.
[3] Sunan Abī Dāwūd 3451 (also Jāmiʿ at-Tirmidhī 1314; Sunan Ibn Mājah 2200) — the Prophet (pbuh) declining to fix prices in Madinah.
[4] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).
[5] Muslim Council of Britain, report into elderly and end-of-life care (https://mcb.org.uk/mcb-report-into-elderly-and-end-of-life-care-launched-at-city-hall/); see also written evidence submitted to the UK Parliament on adult social care in Muslim communities, and The Islamic Movement Trust (https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126189/pdf/).
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