4 articles tagged monetary systems.
A root-level linguistic and juridical investigation into the prohibition of Riba in Islam, the nature of Qard, Dayn, and Bay', and whether fiat currency even qualifies as a Ribawi medium. 119 pages. Primary sources only.
The specter of 'dollar doomsday' tends to arrive wearing the mask of inflation. History is more subtle. A monetary system can absorb sizeable shocks and then re-anchor, unless its institutions fail to correct course.
Money did not begin as a spreadsheet or a blockchain. It began as memory. Strip away the romance and the dollar's primacy flows from an institutional stack: deep collateral markets, reliable settlement, and legal recourse at scale. But the story is not static.
Can one truly avoid riba in a system where the currency itself is born from it? This paper challenges prevailing assumptions about applying classical Islamic rulings on riba to modern fiat currencies.