What the Crypto Fatwa Actually Says

Not investment advice, and not a religious ruling. Capital is at risk.

In June 2026, the Darul Ifta at Darul Uloom Karachi issued a fatwa, endorsed by Sheikh Mufti Taqi Usmani, that ruled a crypto purchase invalid. Within days the headlines had compressed it to four words: crypto trading is haram.

The ruling is real, and Mufti Taqi Usmani is a foundational figure in modern Islamic finance whose work underpins much of the industry. What follows examines the ruling and the premise it rests on, not the scholar, in the spirit of the careful discussion Islamic law has always welcomed. The actual premise is narrower, and more interesting, than the headline.

What it actually says

The fatwa was not a research verdict on an asset class. It answered a specific questioner about specific purchases. Its reasoning rested on one premise: that cryptocurrency, including stablecoins, is not maal, meaning property or wealth, in Islamic law at all. Not risky property. Not prohibited property. Property that does not exist, only, in the ruling's words, imaginary numbers in a ledger.

That is a far more fundamental claim than "trading is risky," and it matters, because almost everything in Islamic commercial law turns on whether something counts as maal. Zakat is due on property. Property is inherited. Someone who destroys your property owes you compensation. If crypto were truly nothing, none of that would apply to the billions of dollars of it Muslims hold today.

The scholarly response

That premise is where the disagreement sits, and it is a disagreement among credentialed scholars, not a fringe objection. Dr Farrukh Habib, a researcher in Islamic finance, published a careful response worth reading in full. Its core:

Something is maal, in the classical criteria, when people desire it, can store it, and exchange it. Value comes from acceptance, what Islamic law calls urf, not from physical form. Copper coins with near-worthless metal were money because people treated them as money. Paper currency since 1971 has no backing but collective acceptance, and no scholar calls it imaginary. By the same criteria, a reserve-backed digital claim that hundreds of millions of people hold and exchange is not obviously nothing.

Intangibility is not the obstacle it might seem either. Islamic legal bodies already recognize intangible commercial rights as property with tradable value. The OIC International Islamic Fiqh Academy did so directly in its Resolution 43 on incorporeal rights, covering trademarks, trade names, copyrights and inventions, and AAOIFI's Standard 42 governs financial rights and their disposition. The test these apply is not what a thing is made of. It is whether people, in real dealings, treat it as valuable.

Habib is careful about what this does and does not settle, and so are we. It does not mean every crypto asset is permissible. It means the honest question is not "is the category real" but "which assets, and which uses, are sound," answered one at a time.

Where SukukFi sits

That second question is the one that matters, and SukukFi welcomes it.

The concerns behind cautious rulings, speculation and gambling and excessive uncertainty, are real, and they are exactly what SukukFi is built to avoid. SukukFi does not ask anyone to hold a speculative token for its price. It uses a reserve-backed stablecoin as a settlement rail for real telecom trade, and it pays a profit share from that trade under a Mudarabah structure, with capital genuinely at risk. The underlying asset is a commercial receivable, the same class of intangible commercial right the standards above already treat as property.

Run SukukFi through the asset-by-asset test rather than the category headline, and it lands on the asset-backed, real-activity side of the line, not the speculative one.

To be clear about what this is not. It is not a claim that any scholar has certified SukukFi, and it is not a claim of Sharia compliance. No independent Sharia board has certified the vault. The point is narrower: the concern the fatwa raises and the way SukukFi is built point in the same direction, away from speculation and toward real assets and shared risk.

The question worth asking

The useful question was never "is crypto haram." It is which structures tie a return to real economic activity and real risk, and which do not. That is the line the jurists have always drawn, and it is the line SukukFi is built to sit on the right side of.

Read is DeFi halal, are stablecoins halal, or how Mudarabah applies to invoice finance.

Nothing here is a ruling. Consult a qualified scholar for your own situation.