Basically, if we do end up using Bitcoin as money, it is overwhelmingly likely that the principles guiding financial intermediation just will be Islamic.

A lot of people think Islamic finance is basically financing without interest, because interest or usury or what we call ribba is impermissible.

And there's good social reasons for that, which we can trace to many religions, Christianity.

For example,

there's the famous case of Jesus in the Temple of Herod overthrowing the tables of the

money changes, because, of course, the money changes were devaluing the currency that the

pilgrims were using. But where we get this concept that interest is haram or impermissible,

is actually from the fundamental principles, which is that there should be no injustice in

financial dealings.

It's about having just trade between two counterparties where they are partners, where they don't

have an asymmetric relationship as borrower lender. Frankly, countries around the world right now,

you know, a huge part of the world, let's kind of broadly call it the global south,

is expending almost half its GDP on servicing the interest payments to, you know, Western

banks and the IMF and the World Bank, rather than their healthcare sector, or sanitation, or roads,

or railways. And that is all a function of money that is easily created, created from the

acts of lending in the first place. So riba, interest, money creation, these are all intrinsically

tied up. And Islamic finance naturally falls out of a Bitcoin standard. It's just good business. It's just ethical. It's just based on sound and healthy economic practice.

Welcome back to the Blockspace podcast. I've got Alan Farrington and Harris Irfan on the show co-authors of Bitcoin Fiat and Islamic finance

and economic, ethical, and historical analysis of sound money in the context of Islamic

teachings.

Alan Harris, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much, Charles.

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