Why should Muslim investors engage with cryptocurrency at all? Some scholars say avoid it completely. Is there a scholarly argument for Muslim participation in the digital financial revolution?

CoinStudy's Shariah Board Chairman Dr. Usman Quddus, PhD in Islamic Studies and Finance, has addressed this question in a scholarly essay that frames it not as a personal investment question but as a civilizational one.

His starting observation is direct: politics and nationalism are both prisoners of economic power. Those who hold capitalist control over capital and trade hold the real authority. The political rise of any nation depends on the free movement of its own resources and capital. The Muslim world has lost sovereignty in its economic dynamics and the capitalist system dominates it. The fall of the Muslim caliphate historically and the decline of various alternative systems are all connected to this same economic reality.

The digital age has introduced something genuinely unprecedented in this picture. For the entirety of modern economic history, financial power has trended toward centralization. Larger banks, more concentrated capital, more powerful financial institutions. The blockchain and tokenized economy represent a structural break from this trend. Economic dynamics are moving from centralized to decentralized rather than becoming more concentrated. The coin and tokenized system is spreading so rapidly that no hand, firm, industry, country, or state will remain untouched by it.

Dr. Quddus's argument for Muslim engagement is therefore not primarily about investment returns. It is about sovereignty. If Muslim communities remain passive while the digital financial revolution reshapes the global economic order, that new order will simply replicate the power dynamics of the old one using different technology. The same interests that hold economic power today will use digital infrastructure to consolidate that power further unless Muslim communities engage actively enough to shape the standards, regulations, and practices of the emerging system.

The practical guidance he offers is specific. Muslim economic experts need platforms for genuine scholarly discussion about digital finance. Muslim nations need to engage with the coming economic order actively and collectively while keeping their own concerns and values in view. The alternative, economic imprisonment by others' systems, will not allow any other order to achieve genuine freedom.

The principle he identifies as the law of advancement is both simple and demanding: truth and practical activity. Truthfulness means engaging honestly with digital finance as it actually is, assessing each instrument against genuine Islamic jurisprudence without blanket rejection or uncritical acceptance. Practical activity means organizing that honest assessment into accessible community-building infrastructure.

The scholarly case for Muslim engagement with cryptocurrency is therefore not that all of it is permissible. Much of it is not. The case is that principled, scholarly, and practically organized engagement is the only path toward the Muslim community having a meaningful voice in how the digital financial revolution develops. Avoidance does not protect the community from the revolution. It simply ensures the community has no part in shaping it.