One of the most perplexing challenges in introducing Muslims to Bitcoin is discovering how little value many place on individual sovereignty. This requires some unpacking. People approach Bitcoin from a variety of perspectives, whether it's for financial gain, technical curiosity, pragmatism, or from a geopolitical angle. Some are captivated by Bitcoin’s permissionless architecture, others by its capacity to undermine dollar hegemony, and many by its potential to offer a genuinely Riba-free monetary alternative (that's me!). I would say that all of these are legitimate and even necessary entry points.
Yet underneath these diverse motivations, we see this recurrent obstacle of discomfort with Bitcoin’s empowerment of the individual. To take Bitcoin seriously is to confront its defining feature that there is no central authority that issues or dictates monetary policy and regulates transactions. Anyone holding private keys can transact without mediation or authorization. Bitcoin exists beyond the epistemic and political architecture of the nation-state. It essentially renders the individual legible only to himself and to God. Unsurprisingly, early adopters tend to be those already inclined toward libertarian or even anarchic sensibilities. But we must mention that Bitcoin also reshapes its users. Self-custody, running a node, conducting Lightning payments, and using privacy tools cultivate a certain mental orientation where autonomy becomes intuitive and even desirable, and the individual discovers that he can navigate the digital and economic world without asking permission from anyone.
From the inside, this transformation feels like a natural process of reclaiming agency. But from the outside, it looks like either toxic nonconformity or dangerous deviance. And it is precisely here that the institutional Muslim response falters. Even among scholars willing to move past the preliminary fiqh disputes, there is often an instinctive aversion not so much to Bitcoin’s mechanics but to the anthropological shift it induces. They basically lack a conceptual vocabulary for a Muslim empowered beyond the nation-state. It's almost as if thoughtless material self-sufficiency is encouraged whereas sovereignty is treated like a threat. The idea that Muslims could coordinate, transact, build, or preserve wealth in cyberspace without a state’s supervision appears to them as a recipe for chaos and disorder, not as an opening toward new forms of communal strength.
This resistance is partly institutional and material. Many scholars and influencers depend, directly or indirectly, on state-affiliated structures and thus perceive any supra-state empowerment as destabilizing. But I think the issue runs deeper. In the dominant modern Muslim imaginary, the state is the final arbiter of order and legitimacy and the only true producer of prosperity and wealth. To cultivate sovereignty outside its orbit feels not just impractical but epistemically forbidden. Why endorse a monetary system that grants individuals a form of autonomy the state cannot surveil, tax, or even meaningfully regulate? Why encourage a tool that undermines the very institutions that fund and validate them?
A similar logic applies to the broader influencer ecosystem. Sovereignty gives individuals control over what they consume and how they spend their time. It gives them more bandwidth to pursue content that they find meaningful. This alone is destabilizing for content economies built on rage-baity attention loops and passive slop consumption. The “fiat influencer” (which includes Dawah Inc) perhaps does not consciously reject sovereignty, but he depends on an audience that remains docile and constantly overstimulated, and structurally incapable of long-form thought. Bitcoin, especially in its cypherpunk instantiation, demands intentionality. It potentially collapses the economics of distraction. So why would an influencer promote a tool that erodes the very psychological environment his livelihood depends on?
Actually, this aversion to sovereignty is one of the defining symptoms of what we have previously called the "Fiat Muslim," or an individual shaped by the surveillance, malincentives, and epistemologies of the modern Riba-based system. We could even say that the discomfort spans across all Muslim cultures and sectarian lines. It is one of the reasons conversations about Bitcoin often stall before they begin, and it is because the prerequisite is not technical understanding but a prior willingness to imagine life beyond the state’s jurisdiction.
If Muslims genuinely hope to introduce others to Bitcoin, the first assessment cannot be about any technical or economic aspect of Bitcoin, or even the mechanics or consequences of Riba money. It must be about disposition. Does this person value sovereignty? Are they dumb enough to believe that taxes are the price we pay for civilized society? Are they capable of imagining themselves as actors rather than subjects, as stewards of their own economic agency rather than dependents of state-centric structures? Without that shift in mindset, Bitcoin becomes unintelligible. The work begins not so much with the protocol itself, but with the interior transformation that makes sovereignty thinkable again.