The Architecture Akhtar Is Asking For: A Response on Money, Riba and Maqasid

Yes: the architecture is now the question

Irshad Akhtar opens with the question that the rest of his essay depends on:

"After decades devoted to developing Sharia-compliant financial instruments, should we now examine more fundamentally the monetary and institutional architecture within which those instruments operate?"

My answer is yes, without qualification, and the examination is overdue. Three reasons make it so.

First, an instrument inherits the properties of the money it is written in. A contract can be purified one transaction at a time; a monetary system cannot. When an Islamic bank finances a purchase, it credits an account, and money is created in exactly the way the Bank of England's 2014 paper describes. Its deposits are bank money of the same kind, its liquidity is managed against the same central bank, and its murabaha and ijarah pricing is routinely benchmarked to the prevailing interest rate (in Pakistan, KIBOR). The contract avoids riba in its form. The money it is denominated in was issued as interest-bearing debt. No amount of work on the first can change the second.

Second, fifty years of instrument-building have shown where that road ends. Each new product has had to compete in a market where the price of money is interest, so each has been engineered to replicate an interest-bearing return with a permissible contract. The result is a sophisticated industry whose economic outcomes, the flow of wealth, the concentration of capital and the position of the debtor, are largely indistinguishable from conventional banking. This is not a failure of the scholars and practitioners who built it. It is what happens when the instruments are reformed and the architecture is not.

Third, the texts themselves speak at the level of the system. The Qur'an sets a distribution rule "so that it will not be a perpetual distribution among the rich from among you" (59:7), a rule about the design of circulation, not about any one contract. In his Farewell Sermon the Prophet ﷺ did not issue guidance on better contracts; he abolished every outstanding riba claim at once, beginning with those of his own uncle (Sahih Muslim 1218). The tradition has always treated riba as a property of an economic order, not only of an agreement.

Answering yes carries a duty that Akhtar rightly imposes: to say what the alternative architecture is, and to hold it to every caution he raises about inflation, credit, shadow banking and foreign exchange. The rest of this response tries to do both.

Akhtar's essay, written after the 5th AlBaraka Summit in London, is careful, well sourced and honest about the costs of reform. It asks the questions that most writing on Islamic finance avoids: not whether a given contract is permissible, but who creates money, who receives it first, who carries the risk, and who keeps the gain. I want to answer it in the same spirit, and to push it one step further.

Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani's answer at the summit was two words: "Change of mentality." Akhtar reads this, rightly, as a call to separate what is legally permissible from what is ethically excellent. My argument is that the mentality he describes cannot change while the architecture stays the same. A contract can be purified one transaction at a time. A monetary system cannot. It either issues money as debt or it does not; it either rewards holding money idle or it does not; it either returns the gain of issuance to the public or it gives it to whoever stands closest to the source.

Akhtar proposes a second phase for Islamic finance, after Pakistan's 2028 deadline, devoted to these structural questions. I agree with the phasing and with every caution he raises. But I want to show that the second phase need not begin as a blank page. The Qur'an and the classical scholars already gave us a theory of money that is precise enough to design against. Muslim economists have long described a model, recognised in the IMF's own 2014 study that he cites, in which guaranteed deposits are fully backed and kept apart from risk-sharing accounts. And there is now at least one working protocol, GX Protocol, whose rules were written from the question he poses rather than retrofitted to an existing bank.

I make one claim about GX and only one: its design has a fundamental alignment with Islamic philosophy and principles of money. It is not an Islamic product, it carries no fatwa, and it is not offered as one. It is a non-profit public-utility protocol open to every participant of every faith. That openness is itself part of the alignment, because the maqasid speak of the welfare of people, not of a market segment.

Is fiat money riba? Ask how it is born, not only what it is

Akhtar separates two propositions: that fiat currency is inherently riba, and that the modern monetary system is deeply intertwined with interest-bearing credit. He accepts the second and rejects the first, noting that "fiat money could be issued without creating a corresponding interest-bearing obligation." The distinction is sound. I want to sharpen it, because it points straight at the answer.

If fiat money could be issued without debt but in practice is not, then the problem lies in the mode of issuance, and the mode of issuance is a design choice. The question is not whether paper or digits can be money. It is how a given money comes into existence, who it reaches first, and whether it holds its measure afterwards. Asked that way, the tradition has a great deal to say.

The classical theory of money

The scholars of the classical period did not treat money as a commodity like any other. Al-Ghazali, in the Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din (Kitab al-Shukr), wrote that God "created dinars and dirhams as two judges and mediators between all other forms of wealth, so that wealth is measured by them." Money is "like the mirror, which has no colour yet reflects every colour," and "they were created to circulate between hands." Whoever hoards them "has wronged them," like one who imprisons the judge of the Muslims; and "whoever deals in riba with dirhams and dinars has been ungrateful for the blessing and has done wrong, for they were created for something else, not for themselves."

Ibn Taymiyyah held that "the purpose of athman is that they be a measure of wealth," not things intended for themselves. He counselled the ruler not to trade in copper coin but to "mint them at their value without profit, for the public good," because trading in them "is a great gate of injustice to people and of consuming their wealth unjustly" (Majmu' al-Fatawa, vol. 29). His student Ibn al-Qayyim wrote that "the price is the standard by which the valuation of wealth is known, so it must be fixed and stable, neither rising nor falling," and condemned the harm done when copper coin was "taken as a commodity traded for profit" (I'lam al-Muwaqqi'in). Ibn Khaldun called gold and silver "the (measure of) value for all capital accumulations," exempt from the market fluctuations to which other things are subject (Muqaddimah, ch. V). And when Egypt suffered famine and ruinous prices between 1403 and 1406, al-Maqrizi, in Ighathat al-Ummah, identified the deterioration of the currency, the flood of copper coin, as the most important cause and called for a return to gold and silver.

The common thread is a theory of money as a public trust: a measure that must give full weight, must circulate, and must not become a source of gain for whoever controls its issue. Its modern restatement comes from Mufti Taqi Usmani himself. In his opinion in the 1999 riba judgment of the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan (Dr. M. Aslam Khaki v. Syed Muhammad Hashim, PLD 2000 SC 225), he wrote: "Money has no intrinsic utility. It cannot be utilized in direct fulfillment of human needs," and so there "remains no room for making itself an object of profitable trade." The same opinion traced "the birth of 'money creation' or 'fractional reserve lending'" and observed that "the modern banks are creating money out of nothing." The judgment was set aside on review in 2002 and remanded to the Federal Shariat Court, but its analysis of money remains on the record. Akhtar asks whether the industry should now examine the architecture of money. The scholar whose words he quotes examined it from the bench a quarter of a century ago.

Three tests fiat money fails

In my research paper From Gold to Paper, I examined the six ribawi items of the hadith of Ubadah ibn al-Samit, "gold for gold, silver for silver ... like for like, equal for equal, hand to hand" (Sahih Muslim 1587), and derived seven traits they share, among them like-for-like interchangeability, intrinsic worth, durability, general acceptance, a known specification and measurement by weight or volume. Fiat fails all seven. It is not a fatwa, and I do not offer it as one. But it shows that modern money does not even meet the description of the money the riba rules were written for. That should give pause to anyone who assumes the rules can be applied to it unchanged.

The second test is birth. Fiat money is not only intertwined with interest-bearing credit; most of it exists as that credit. A deposit created when a bank lends is a debt owed by the borrower, priced at interest from the first day. As I put it in Six Roots, that is "riba built into the currency's birth certificate". Akhtar is right that a deposit created alongside a loan creates no net wealth for the borrower. But it does create an income for the creator: an interest stream on money that cost almost nothing to make. That is seigniorage, privatised, and it accrues to whoever stands nearest the point of issue.

The third test is measure. A central bank that targets two per cent inflation has adopted, as stated policy, a unit that gives less each year than it gave the year before. The Prophet ﷺ said, "Whoever cheats us is not of us" (Sahih Muslim 102). The hadith concerns a trader who hid wet grain beneath dry. In From Gold to Paper I asked whether inflation is itself the primary act of ghashsh, with interest a secondary symptom. A saver who receives full measure in wages and is repaid in a diluted unit has been given short weight, whoever signed the contract.

Why this answers Akhtar's opening question

Put together, these three tests explain why contractual compliance has hit a ceiling. An Islamic bank can pass every contractual test and still hold its depositors' savings in a unit that was born as interest-bearing debt and is diluted by policy. In my response to Miftah Ismail I described Pakistan's Islamic banking as "filtering the water with great care while the well itself is the source of the contamination." Akhtar's second phase is the decision to examine the well. The classical scholars have already told us what clean water looks like: a measure that does not move, issued without debt, kept in circulation, and never a source of gain for its issuer.

Riba is a structure of claims, not only a clause in a contract

The Qur'an's passage on riba (2:275 to 2:281) is usually read as a rule about contracts. Read in sequence, it describes a structure: a claim that grows with time while the person who owes it does not.

"That is because they say, 'Trade is [just] like interest.' But Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest." (Qur'an 2:275)

The objection the verse answers is an economist's objection: both trade and lending produce a gain, so why treat them differently? The answer the passage builds is that the source of the gain differs. In trade, the gain is tied to an exchange of something real and to the risk of that exchange failing. In riba, the creditor's claim grows by the passage of time alone, whatever happens to the debtor.

The passage then sets three boundaries in quick succession:

1. The gain itself is rejected. "Allah destroys interest and gives increase for charities" (2:276). Riba is set against sadaqah, not merely against trade: one transfers wealth upward to the one who already has it, the other transfers it to the one who needs it.
2. The principal is protected, and justice runs both ways. "If you repent, you may have your principal; [thus] you do no wrong, nor are you wronged" (2:279). The creditor is not expropriated. The excess is.
3. The debtor in hardship has a right. "And if someone is in hardship, then [let there be] postponement until [a time of] ease. But if you give [from your right as] charity, then it is better for you, if you only knew" (2:280).

The historical practice the passage abolished, riba al-jahiliyyah, is precisely the failure of the third boundary: "pay now, or the debt grows and you get more time." The debtor's inability to pay became the creditor's opportunity. In his Farewell Sermon the Prophet ﷺ abolished every outstanding riba claim of the pre-Islamic era and began with the claims of his own uncle, al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib (Sahih Muslim 1218). The reform began at the top, with the strongest creditor in the family.

The Prophet ﷺ also sought refuge in his prayer from al-maghram, the burden of debt. When asked why he did so often, he said that a man in debt speaks and lies, promises and breaks his promise (Sahih al-Bukhari 832). Debt is treated as a condition that degrades conduct, not as a neutral financial position.

This matters for Akhtar's opening question. If riba were only a clause, then an Islamic bank inside a debt-issued monetary system would be clean, and the question of fiat money would be closed. But if riba is a structure, a claim that compounds against someone who cannot escape it, then the question is open at the level of the system. A monetary system in which the money supply itself exists as interest-bearing debt places every holder of money, Muslim or not, inside that structure, even if no individual contract they sign mentions interest.

The Prophet ﷺ cursed "the accepter of interest and its payer, and one who records it, and the two witnesses," and said, "They are all equal" (Sahih Muslim 1598). The scribe and the witnesses do not lend or borrow. They are the infrastructure that records and validates the claim. It is hard to read this without asking what the hadith implies for the infrastructure of a monetary system, and not only for its parties.

In my earlier essay, Beyond the Prohibition of Riba: Reclaiming the Social and Economic Purpose of Islam, I argued that the prohibition is followed immediately by the duty to the debtor in hardship, and that modern Islamic finance has given the first far more institutional weight than the second. Akhtar's essay gives the same argument a monetary dimension. The two belong together: the injustice of riba is visible in the single contract, but it is produced at scale by the system that issues money.

The Chicago Plan arrives where the tradition began

Akhtar finds an "unexpected parallel" between the Chicago Plan and Islamic finance. It is less unexpected than it looks. The Chicago economists of 1933 arrived, by monetary reasoning, at a separation the Islamic tradition draws by moral reasoning: money held in trust for payment is one thing; capital committed to a venture, and exposed to its loss, is another. The first must be safe and must not be lent. The second must share in the outcome.

In the classical law this is the difference between wadi'ah, a deposit held in trust that the keeper may not use, and mudarabah or musharakah, a partnership in which the capital provider shares profit and bears loss. The IMF's 2014 study that Akhtar cites describes exactly this structure as the theoretical Islamic banking model: full reserves for guaranteed demand deposits, and separate profit-and-loss-sharing accounts. Akhtar is careful to say that the parallel does not prove the Chicago Plan is Islamic. I agree. The direction of the proof runs the other way: the Chicago Plan is a twentieth-century rediscovery of a distinction the tradition never abandoned in principle, only in practice.

Akhtar then proposes three reforms. Each is right, and each becomes simpler when it is built into the architecture rather than added to an existing bank.

Reform one: separate safe money from risk

Akhtar proposes fully backed transaction accounts alongside conventional Islamic accounts, and lists honestly what that requires: segregation, reserve ownership, insolvency treatment and settlement access. Every item on that list exists because the bank is both the keeper of the ledger and a lender with an interest in the deposits. As I wrote in What Is the Role of a Bank?, "A keeper who can add to the ledger at will is a keeper who can quietly dilute everything already written on it."

On a public ledger with published rules, the separation is native rather than legal. A participant's balance is the participant's own; no institution can lend it on, because no institution holds it. Lending capital is a different, separately allocated stock. The segregation Akhtar's lawyers would have to construct is simply the shape of the system. Pakistan's Raast, which he rightly names as a strong payments foundation, shows that the rails can be built. What a payment rail alone cannot provide is a unit that is not born as someone's debt.

Reform two: revive genuine risk-sharing

Akhtar notes that murabaha and ijarah dominate because equity-style finance carries information problems, monitoring costs and disputes over reported profit. That is true. It is also true that genuine partnership cannot compete in a market where a guaranteed, interest-shaped return is always available as the alternative. As I put it in my reply to Miftah Ismail, "A financier who cannot lose when his partner loses is not a partner."

Remove the interest-shaped alternative and the calculation changes. Where no lender in the system may charge for time, the only way to earn on capital is to share in the venture. The monitoring problems do not disappear, which is why GX pairs profit-and-loss sharing with licensed providers, published splits, audit and revocation powers. But risk-sharing stops being the brave exception and becomes the ordinary case.

Reform three: govern money creation

Akhtar's third reform is the most sensitive and the one he treats most cautiously: a larger role for publicly issued money, with strong safeguards against fiscal dominance. He is right that "the objective should therefore not be to replace private monetary discretion with unconstrained government discretion."

There is a third option he does not consider: no discretion at all. A supply fixed at genesis, issued by grant to persons rather than by loan to borrowers, with every subsequent flow governed by published rules, removes the question of who should hold the power to create money by removing the power. The gain of issuance, which Umer Chapra and other Muslim economists have long argued should belong to the public, is distributed once, per person, and cannot be claimed again by anyone. This is what I mean by "equity at the foundation, honest flows thereafter, dignity preserved beneath all, effort rewarded above."

The maqasid are a test of systems, not a seal on products

Akhtar asks what Islamic finance should measure beyond assets, deposits and sukuk issuance. The tradition already gave the answer: the maqasid al-shari'ah, the purposes the law serves. Al-Ghazali, in al-Mustasfa, named five necessities the law exists to protect: faith, life, intellect, lineage and wealth. Al-Shatibi, in al-Muwafaqat, made them the organising principle of legal reasoning. A financial instrument can satisfy every formal rule and still fail these purposes, if the system it lives inside erodes the wealth of the many to preserve the claims of the few.

This is why I have argued that "Shariah compliance" is the wrong frame. Compliance is an ex-post certification: a conventional instrument is examined for surface conformity to legal categories and then approved. The forms change, the contracts are restructured, the vocabulary is replaced, but the flow of wealth, the concentration of capital and the extraction from the productive by the financial remain largely as they were. The better question is not whether an element can be made to fit a classical category. It is whether the deep structure of the system conforms to what the Qur'an and the Sunnah teach about wealth, justice and the relationship between people and the money they share.

Hifz al-mal is the protection of everyone's wealth

The preservation of wealth cannot mean only the preservation of the creditor's claim. A saver whose wages lose purchasing power every year to an expansion of money she had no part in has not had her wealth preserved. The Qur'an condemns those who "when they take a measure from people, take in full, but if they give by measure or by weight to them, they cause loss" (83:2-3). A monetary system that demands full repayment of loans in a unit it is steadily diluting fits that description structurally, whatever the intentions of the people who run it. Honest measure is restored not by exhortation but by architecture.

Wealth is held in trust and must circulate

The Qur'an treats wealth as a trust before it treats it as property: "spend out of that in which He has made you successive inheritors" (57:7), and "give them from the wealth of Allah which He has given you" (24:33). It names the systemic danger plainly. The distribution of fay' is set "so that it will not be a perpetual distribution among the rich from among you" (59:7). Akhtar, and my own earlier essay, both note that this verse concerns a specific category of public wealth and is not a blanket rule on private holdings. That is correct. But its stated reason is general, and it is a reason about design: a distribution rule was chosen so that wealth would not pool at the top.

The same concern appears as a warning against stagnation. "Those who hoard gold and silver and spend it not in the way of Allah, give them tidings of a painful punishment" (9:34). The Prophet ﷺ said, "He who hoards is a sinner" (Sahih Muslim 1605), a hadith about withholding goods to raise their price, but one that states the principle that withholding what the community needs is a wrong in itself. Money that sits idle is money withheld from exchange.

Zakat is a circulation rule with a destination

Zakat is often described as charity. Economically it is more precise: an annual levy on wealth held above a threshold for a full year, with eight named categories of recipient (9:60), among them the poor, the needy and al-gharimin, those overwhelmed by debt. When the Prophet ﷺ sent Mu'adh ibn Jabal to Yemen, he described zakat as wealth "taken from the rich among them and given to the poor among them" (Sahih al-Bukhari 1496). "From their properties was [given] the right of the [needy] petitioner and the deprived" (51:19). The share is called a right that already belongs to them, not a favour granted.

Zakat, the duty of respite to the debtor in hardship (2:280), and the benevolent loan, qard hasan, which the Qur'an uses as the image of giving to Allah Himself ("Who is it that would loan Allah a goodly loan so He will multiply it for him?", 57:11), are three different instruments. One transfers, one forbears, one lends without gain. Together they describe a system that expects some people to fall into need and builds the way back out into its own structure.

Measuring what Akhtar asks to measure

Akhtar's proposed measures are exactly the maqasid restated: how much capital reaches small enterprises, whether savings become long-term productive capital, whether risk is borne fairly, whether access to housing and enterprise widens beyond those who already hold collateral. I would add three tests that come straight from the texts above, and that any monetary design can be scored against:

1. The measure test (83:1-3). Does the unit hold its measure, or can someone dilute it?
2. The circulation test (59:7, 9:34). Does new money reach people first, or the already wealthy first, and is idle hoarding rewarded or discouraged?
3. The debtor test (2:280, 9:60). Does the system's design include a way out for the person who cannot pay, or does it compound against him?

These tests do not require anyone to be Muslim to apply them. A Hindu engineer in Bengaluru, a Christian economist in Sao Paulo or a secular policymaker in Stockholm can score a system against them on its arithmetic alone. That is the meaning of alignment as opposed to compliance: the principles are revealed, but the reasoning that confirms them is open to all.

Where GX Protocol fits: the four questions answered by rule

Akhtar ends with four questions: who creates money, who receives capital, who bears financial risk, and how the rewards are distributed. GX Protocol answers each with a published, immutable rule rather than with institutional discretion. The table below sets each of his questions beside the principle it touches and the GX rule that addresses it.

Issuance without debt

In the system the Bank of England describes, new money enters the economy as a loan, and so it reaches first those who can offer collateral. In GX Protocol, new units reach people first. Nearly half of the entire supply, GX 602,750,000,000, is reserved for allocation grants to 4,000,000,000 identity-verified persons. A further GX 150,000,000,000 is credited to national treasuries, GX 50 or GX 25 for each participant of that nation, at the same moment and in the same atomic action as the participant's own grant. A state receives its share because its people take part, not because it borrows.

It answers a concern Umer Chapra raised in Towards a Just Monetary System (1985): that the seigniorage of money creation should benefit society as a whole rather than the banks that create it. GX does not route that gain through a government. It routes it directly to persons, with the state's share fixed by rule and tied to its population, so no ministry can increase it.

A fixed measure

One GX is defined as one gram of gold, fixed at genesis. The protocol keeps no gold price feed and offers no redemption right, so this is not a gold-backed currency in the twentieth-century sense. It is a unit definition that does not move, which is what the classical scholars asked money to be: a measure that gives full weight. The dinar of early Islam was a weight of gold; the GX unit is a weight of gold by definition, and its total supply cannot be enlarged by anyone.

No price for time

The protocol's "time-delay payment rule" is the clearest point of alignment. In the words of the GX Foundation Brief: "A payment made hand-to-hand at the time of a transaction is permitted as trade profit. A payment made later, where a time delay is introduced between the transaction and settlement, must never carry any charge or fee for the delay." Charging for delay is "a fundamental violation and grounds for immediate license cancellation." That is the Qur'anic distinction of 2:275, between the gain of trade and the gain of time, written as protocol law.

The protocol is also honest about the limit of that law. It sees only transfers made inside it, and a lender and borrower could keep a side agreement it cannot see. The Foundation Brief states this plainly and treats it as an enforcement problem, to be met with pattern detection, attestation, audit and licence revocation: "The rule stands regardless of detectability." A rule that admits its own blind spot is more trustworthy than one that claims to have none.

Qard hasan as infrastructure, not charity

My earlier essay asked why benevolent lending has never become a dependable, widely accessible institution. GX Protocol makes it a standing pool. Personal loans are "absolutely zero interest, principal repaid only," drawn from a GX 36,000,000,000 Participant Loan Pool. Eligibility does not depend on collateral or on a credit bureau. It depends on a trust score earned from confirmed, identity-verified relationships: family, in-laws, friends and colleagues who vouch for a person by connecting to them. A person brand new to the protocol, with no confirmed connections yet, is not yet eligible; the pool rewards a community that knows its members, which is how qard hasan has always worked in practice.

Risk capital kept apart from money

Akhtar's first reform separates safe money from risk. In GX Protocol the lending capital is not the participants' money. Business, government and personal lending are funded from pools allocated at genesis, and business financing is profit-and-loss sharing only, originated by licensed Financial Service Providers. A participant who holds units to be paid wages and pay bills is not drawn into the risk of a loan book, and a provider who shares in a venture's profit also shares in its loss.

Circulation instead of hoarding

The velocity tax is the mechanism most likely to be misunderstood, so it deserves precision. It does not touch the first GX 100 of anyone's balance, by an immutable rule. Above that it applies an annual rate rising in bands from 3% to 6%, and only after a balance has been held above GX 100 for 360 cumulative days. Its proceeds go out again: half to a basic-income pool that tops up every account below GX 24, a quarter to charitable grants, and a quarter to national treasuries.

The resemblance to zakat is real and should be stated with care. The exemption threshold of GX 100 is, by definition, 100 grams of gold, close to the classical nisab of gold, commonly computed at about 85 grams. The 360-day condition sits close to the hawl, the lunar year of about 354 days. The proceeds flow toward the poor. But the velocity tax is not zakat. It is a protocol rule applied to every participant of every faith, its rates are not zakat's rate, and it does not discharge any Muslim's zakat obligation. What it shares with zakat is the principle beneath both: money held idle carries a cost, and that cost is returned to circulation and to those in need.

Limits that a Muslim reader would recognise

GX Protocol bars its partners and merchants from six industries: gambling, adult entertainment, narcotics, arms and munitions, alcohol and tobacco. Its insurance partners are cooperative insurers, the model takaful is built on. Ten per cent of all units, GX 125,000,000,000, are held in a charitable and non-profit pool. None of these choices was made to win a religious endorsement. They follow from the same premise: money exists to serve people, not to multiply itself.

Akhtar's cautions are right, and a design must answer each one

The strongest part of Akhtar's essay is its refusal to oversell. Every caution he raises is a real failure mode, and any proposal that cannot answer them deserves his scepticism. Here is how each one stands against a design built from the principles above.

Fiscal dominance and inflation. Akhtar warns that public control of money creation can become politically motivated expansion, and that inflation is "profoundly regressive." He is right, and this is why GX gives no one the power to issue. The total supply is a constant, not a policy variable. No government, foundation or validator can add a unit. Treasuries receive a share of issuance by formula, tied to their population's participation, and the only other public income is a share of the velocity tax and of fees, both published. The Qur'an's warning against those who "give less" when they measure (83:1-3) applies to a monetary authority that debases its unit; the safest monetary authority is one that has no authority to debase.

The opposite risk: a fixed supply that rewards hoarding. A fixed supply raises the opposite danger. If the economy grows and the money supply does not, prices can fall, and falling prices pay people to sit on money rather than spend or lend it. This is the classical argument against a pure gold standard, and it is serious. GX answers it with the velocity tax: holding a large idle balance has a known annual cost, so the incentive to hoard is offset by design. GX did not take this from any economic school; it follows from the same premise as the Qur'an's warning against those who hoard gold and silver and do not spend it (9:34): money exists to move.

Reduced credit availability. Akhtar notes that removing banks' power to create deposits could make finance scarcer, especially for small firms and poor households. GX does not start from a banking system and then restrict it. It starts with lending capital already in place: GX 336,000,000,000 across the business, government and participant loan pools, 26.88% of the entire supply, set aside before the first loan is made. That capital is finite, and repayments are what renew it, so lending discipline matters as much here as in any Qard Hasan fund. But the poorest participant's access does not depend on a bank's appetite for collateral.

Shadow banking. Akhtar fears that credit pushed out of banks will reappear in less-regulated institutions. In GX every lender is a licensed Financial Service Provider, no provider may hold more than 5% to 20% of an addressable market, and a fiat-licensed entity may take part only through a separate legal entity with no shared management, no co-mingled holdings and an annual audited attestation of separation. The protocol also admits that side agreements outside its view are possible, and treats them as an enforcement matter. That is not a guarantee against leverage. It is a set of hard boundaries in place of the soft ones he is worried about.

Foreign exchange and the IMF. Akhtar is right that "creating additional rupees does not create additional US dollars," and nothing in GX pretends otherwise. GX is deliberately disconnected from fiat: no exchange, no on-ramp, no off-ramp. It does not replace the rupee, it does not touch the State Bank's balance sheet, and a state need not change any law or commitment for its people to take part. It is a parallel public utility that a country can observe working before deciding anything. For a remittance economy, its cross-border fee between individuals is at most 0.025%, so a cross-border transfer of GX 2 costs GX 0.000125.

Distribution is not automatic. Akhtar warns that even fully backed money can still flow mostly to the already wealthy. That is exactly why distribution in GX is a rule and not an outcome. The first unit a person ever holds is a grant made to them as a person. The proceeds of the velocity tax flow to the basic-income pool, to charity and to treasuries. The 59:7 test, that wealth not circulate only among the rich, is built into the issuance itself rather than left to the policies of whoever controls credit.

Interest can recirculate. Akhtar corrects a common error: banks creating money does not mean an economy must keep creating new debt just to pay the interest, because interest payments recirculate. I accept the correction. The argument here does not depend on that claim. It depends on two others he also accepts: that the allocation of newly created money is not neutral, and that its first recipients are those who already hold collateral.

From a change of mentality to a change of architecture

Akhtar's closing proposal is modest and exactly right: an independent research programme, then a limited, voluntary pilot with explicit safeguards, a Sharia assessment of the precise design, and no wider implementation presumed in advance. "The purpose," he writes, "would be to generate evidence."

I would add one thing to his proposal. The evidence does not have to wait for a national pilot to be designed. A voluntary, bounded, observable experiment in separating money from debt can exist alongside the national system without asking it to change. GX Protocol is built to be that kind of experiment: it requires no change to the rupee, no change to the State Bank's mandate and no change to any international commitment. A researcher, a regulator or a Sharia board can watch it, score it and criticise it in the open. Its rules are published, its supply is fixed, and every flow is on a public ledger.

To make that scrutiny concrete, I built Mizan, a diagnostic tool that applies a simple strip test to any arrangement: remove the labels and the contract forms, and "if what remains is money in, more money out, by prior agreement, the arrangement contains Riba." I invite Akhtar, the AlBaraka Forum, and the researchers of the State Bank and the Islamic Fiqh Academy to apply it, and the three tests above, to GX Protocol, to their own institutions and to the rupee itself, and to publish what they find. The invitation is not to pass a verdict on GX Protocol but to help build it. Wherever its philosophy or its fundamentals fall short, they can be corrected, and every improvement, enhancement and correction offered brings it closer to a sound monetary instrument. Work of that kind would also give the second phase Akhtar describes something to begin from.

Mufti Taqi Usmani asked for a change of mentality. A mentality is changed most surely by what people can see working. For half a century the work of Islamic finance has been to build permissible rooms inside a building whose foundations were laid on interest-bearing debt. The question Akhtar has asked, whether to examine the building itself, deserves the answer I gave at the start: yes. The Qur'an told us what the foundations should be. "Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest" (2:275). A measure that gives full weight. Wealth that does not circulate only among the rich. A right for the one who asks and the one who is deprived. Respite for the one in hardship. None of these is a product. All of them are architecture.

GX Protocol does not claim to be Islamic. It claims something narrower and, I think, more useful: that a monetary system built honestly from first principles arrives where the revelation began. For the Muslim, that is confirmation. For everyone else, it is an invitation to check the arithmetic.

References

The essay this responds to

• Irshad Akhtar, Beyond the Prohibition of Interest: Rethinking the Foundations of Islamic Finance, LinkedIn, 20 October 2026.

Qur'an (Sahih International translation, quran.com)

• 2:275-281 (riba, principal, the debtor in hardship); 3:130; 4:29; 9:34-35 (hoarding); 9:60 (zakat recipients); 24:33; 51:19; 57:7; 57:11 (the goodly loan); 59:7 (circulation among the rich); 83:1-3 (short measure).

Hadith (references follow sunnah.com numbering)

• Sahih Muslim 1587, Ubadah ibn al-Samit: the six commodities, "like for like and equal for equal, payment being made hand to hand."
• Sahih Muslim 1598, Jabir: the curse on the accepter of interest, its payer, its scribe and its two witnesses.
• Sahih Muslim 1218, Jabir: the Farewell Sermon, abolition of the riba of al-Abbas.
• Sahih Muslim 102: "Whoever cheats us is not of us."
• Sahih Muslim 1605: "He who hoards is a sinner."
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1496, Mu'adh ibn Jabal: zakat "taken from the rich among them and given to the poor among them."
• Sahih al-Bukhari 832, Aisha: refuge from debt, and the debtor who "tells lies whenever he speaks."

Classical sources (passages rendered from the Arabic editions)

• Al-Ghazali, Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din, Kitab al-Shukr, vol. 4, pp. 91-92 (Dar al-Ma'rifa). English: H. T. Littlejohn, On Patience and Thankfulness, Islamic Texts Society.
• Al-Ghazali, al-Mustasfa min 'Ilm al-Usul: the five necessities.
• Al-Shatibi, al-Muwafaqat, Kitab al-Maqasid.
• Ibn Taymiyyah, Majmu' al-Fatawa, vols. 19 and 29: athman as a measure; the minting of fulus.
• Ibn al-Qayyim, I'lam al-Muwaqqi'in: the price as a fixed standard.
• Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 312-313.
• Al-Maqrizi, Ighathat al-Ummah bi-Kashf al-Ghummah (1405); see A. A. Islahi, Al-Maqrizi's Economic Thought.

Modern sources

• Supreme Court of Pakistan, Shariat Appellate Bench, Dr. M. Aslam Khaki v. Syed Muhammad Hashim, PLD 2000 SC 225 (1999), opinion of Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani, paras. 136, 145, 172-173. Text.
• M. Umer Chapra, Towards a Just Monetary System (Islamic Foundation, Leicester, 1985).
• M. McLeay, A. Radia and R. Thomas, Money Creation in the Modern Economy, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014 Q1.
• J. Benes and M. Kumhof, The Chicago Plan Revisited, IMF Working Paper WP/12/202, 2012.
• IMF, Regulation and Supervision of Islamic Banks, IMF Working Paper WP/14/219, 2014.
• H. Askari, Z. Iqbal, N. Krichene and A. Mirakhor, Risk Sharing in Finance: The Islamic Finance Alternative (Wiley, 2012).
• A. K. Meera and M. Larbani, "Seigniorage of fiat money and the maqasid al-shari'ah", Humanomics, 2006.
• Constitution of Pakistan, Article 38(f), as amended by the Twenty-Sixth Amendment (2024): riba to be eliminated before 1 January 2028.

My earlier writing

• Beyond the Prohibition of Riba: Reclaiming the Social and Economic Purpose of Islam.
• From Gold to Paper, riba research paper, 2026.
• First Principles, Not Compliance, 2026.
• Mufti Taqi Usmani Ruled Crypto Is Not Maal. The Six Roots Ask a Harder Question., 2026.
• Variable Profits Are Not Enough: A Response to Miftah Ismail, 2026.
• What Is the Role of a Bank?, 2026.
• Equity Without Illusion, 2026.
• Introducing Mizan, 2026, and the Mizan tool.

GX Protocol

• GX Protocol Foundation Brief, version 1.4.0 (20 July 2026): supply, allocation, velocity tax, lending, fees and standing doctrine.

This response is not a fatwa and makes no claim of Sharia compliance for GX Protocol. It argues for alignment of principle, and invites scrutiny of that claim.