Nostr notes by thebitcoinguide

Plenty of Muslims holding Bitcoin want to pay their zakat in ...

2026-10-27T20:05:00Z

Plenty of Muslims holding Bitcoin want to pay their zakat in Bitcoin. Most mosques and charities can't accept it.

That came up on our UK tax panel with Shukry Haleemdeen (My Crypto Tax). His clients want to give zakat on their gains without cashing out first, and charities pay no capital gains tax on it. The opportunity is there. The infrastructure isn't, yet.

Hosted by RizqRevolution (npub1ue7…ch8h) , the panel also covers what's actually taxable, what HMRC can see, and how a business can start accepting Bitcoin, all done properly and above board.

Watch the full panel:

https://youtu.be/orEfeYuAbYs

Subscribe, like and share on YouTube, we're uploading a new session every day!

Bitcoin alone won't make you sovereign. That's where ...

2026-10-26T20:07:00Z

Bitcoin alone won't make you sovereign.

That's where npub1473kymvazn0mpnptcxeqwsajjp375wul9fjuh8jxt8magnkacmpqzsg6c (npub1473…sg6c) started his session at the Muslim Bitcoin Summit, and it's a direct challenge to the self-congratulation you hear at most Bitcoin conferences.

A paper Bitcoin standard, the AI-driven surveillance state, and why the real fight ahead is over governance, not just keys.

With Mbitcoiner (npub1uzf…57h3) & subhan (npub1tw4…xpqe)

"If you don't have sovereignty, then none of the other stuff matters."

Watch the full session:

https://youtu.be/g0UqM4emXwg

Subscribe, like and share on YouTube, we're uploading a new session every day!

"Bitcoin's going to free Palestine." That's the ...

2026-10-25T20:02:00Z

"Bitcoin's going to free Palestine."

That's the line that got Maher Janajri into Bitcoin back in 2013. On this panel we got into what that actually looks like on the ground.

Getting money into Gaza when banks can't. Escaping the shekel in the West Bank. Circular Bitcoin economies in Africa, and what the ummah can learn from them.

With Mbitcoiner (npub1uzf…57h3) , subhan (npub1tw4…xpqe) & Maher Janajri.

"He doesn't want my handout. He wants a halal, dignified income."

Watch the full panel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLi7X1J9SNc

Subscribe, like and share on YouTube, we're uploading a new session every day!

Not the keynote you'd expect at a Bitcoin summit, and one of ...

2026-10-24T19:04:00Z

Not the keynote you'd expect at a Bitcoin summit, and one of the ones we were asked about most.

Safdar Alam (npub1rn0…7xpe) , former Global Head of Islamic Structuring at J.P. Morgan, on why Islamic finance went wrong, and how Muslims can re-architect the financial system, and civilisation, from first principles.

Bitcoin is part of the conversation, but not the whole answer.

"If you don't have a philosophy of capital, the market will push it onto you."

Watch the full keynote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ0rR_ujO6o

Subscribe, like and share on YouTube, we're uploading a new session every day!

Got it, thank you!

2026-10-24T15:25:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…686l
_________________________

Got it, thank you!

@npub175n…g6w0 Scheduled posting on NoorNote would be really ...

2026-10-24T07:06:55Z

alp (npub175n…g6w0) Scheduled posting on NoorNote would be really cool, not sure if it's achievable?

I genuinely think this is one of the best keynotes you'll ...

2026-10-23T21:21:27Z

I genuinely think this is one of the best keynotes you'll ever hear.

Simon Dixon at the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London, on how Bitcoin combats the military, financial & technical industrial complex.

You could literally feel the impact this had on everyone in the room. Riba, the rise and fall of empires, war, the coming digital control grid, and why owning your own key is the way out.

"The ability to be at the right side of a money printer determines who rules the world."

Watch the full keynote:

https://youtu.be/3K_aLxhCFpA

Remember to subscribe, like + share on YouTube, we're adding a new session every day:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaYwlHDGyJEI

Bitcoin in Islam: Alignment to Islamic Principles & the ...

2026-10-22T21:42:39Z

Bitcoin in Islam: Alignment to Islamic Principles & the Economic Model

An eye opening conversation with Shaykh Mu'aawiyah Tucker, Shaykh Abdulwahid Stephenson & Bashar Humeid, on the first panel of the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lz6EOFJYnYA

Save the playlist, we're adding a new session every day!

A great point! Infact our Shaykh Mu’aawiyah tucker spoke about ...

2026-10-22T07:28:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…ef9g
_________________________

A great point! Infact our Shaykh Mu’aawiyah tucker spoke about this in one of the discussions at the summit. It was a really cool perspective, we’ll be uploading it!

The Money Behind Power: Finance, Geopolitics & the Search for ...

2026-10-21T21:02:50Z

The Money Behind Power: Finance, Geopolitics & the Search for a Better Finance System.

Harris Irfan delivers his powerful key note at the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London:
https://youtu.be/ZzTuTwVtlis

Make sure you save the playlist, we’ll be adding each day inshaAllah

The first video from the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London is here! ...

2026-10-20T22:06:56Z

The first video from the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London is here!
https://youtu.be/iD2eRFwlBTk

We'll be uploading all the talks and panels, one per day, to the playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaYwlHDGyJEI

Here’s how we did it. An amazing effort. Alhamdulilah ...

2026-10-19T14:06:14Z

Here’s how we did it. An amazing effort. Alhamdulilah

quoting
naddr1qq…7l9r

How we hosted the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London for under £15k

People keep asking me how we did it, so I thought I'd write it down properly while it's still fresh. We ran a two-day international conference in London on a budget most event organisers would laugh at. Four months of planning. Ten people, none of us doing this full-time. Not a penny of corporate sponsorship. Delegates who flew in from across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. This isn't a victory lap. It's the unofficial playbook - what we did, in what order, what it cost us in time rather than money, and the bits we could've done better. If you're sitting in another city thinking about doing the same thing, you should read this, rather than starting from nothing. It was important that we operated on a 'shoestring' budget. We are just ordinary guys, like most people, with regular fiat jobs, families to feed and rent to pay, but we're all committed to taking back control of our money, data and digital tools. There are no 'Bitcoin whales' in this team. One thing worth saying up front, because it shapes everything that follows: there is no organisation behind this. No company, no board, no staff, no office. I'll come back to that at the end, but keep it in mind as you read.

What we actually ran

The Muslim Bitcoin Summit London 2026 ran on 10 and 11 October at the Atrium in London, under the banner of the Anti-Riba Money Conference. Day 1 opened with Qur'an recitation and consisted of three keynotes and five panels, including a closing Q&A at the end, with breaks built into the schedule including lunch and prayers. Day 2 was different in kind. We ran the Digital Hijrah workshops on Bitcoin, Nostr and GrapheneOS, and a closing group discussion. Tickets were £50 for Saturday and £70 for the weekend, lunch included in both. Delegates travelled from across the world: from the United States, to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Bulgaria, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Palestine, Malaysia, Australia and more. Every speaker and panellist came unpaid. The whole thing was community-funded and non-profit, with no major corporate sponsors.

Why cheap was the point

We could have raised more. There is money in this space, and a conference about Bitcoin in London is not a hard sell to a sponsor looking for a logo on a backdrop. We chose not to, and the reason sits at the centre of everything the Summit was about. If you are going to stand on a stage and tell a room full of Muslims that the debt-based monetary system has captured our institutions, you cannot have arrived there on capture. A conference funded by the community who attend it answers to the people who attend it. A conference funded by a corporate sponsor answers to the sponsor, and the answer shows up in the programme, in who gets a keynote, in which critiques quietly do not get made. There is a second reason, less principled and more practical. Cost is a filter on ambition in the worst way. If running an event costs £100,000, then only people with access to £100,000 run events, and the community waits for permission from whoever has it. If it costs under £15,000, a determined group in Istanbul or Abu Dhabi or Kuala Lumpur can do the same thing next year without asking anyone. Keeping the number small was not only a necessity, it was an attempt to make the thing repeatable. And the third reason, which I may as well admit: we didn't have the money anyway. All three are true at the same time. But I want to be clear that we set the ceiling deliberately, in June, before we had any idea what we could raise.

Four months, one small team

We started in June. That gave us roughly four months, which is tight for an international conference and would have been impossible without a highly committed and disciplined team, alhamdulillah. The core UK team was Ashik and Michael, with support from Hasnain and Fraz. The offshore team, from the US, Denmark and elsewhere, was Abdullah, Bashar, Salah and Salman, with support from Tee and Subhan. Nobody on the team did this full-time. Everyone had jobs, businesses and families. The offshore arrangement turned out to be a blessing rather than a handicap. They had first-hand experience of organising and delivering the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in Dallas for two years running. But the part we did not anticipate was what happened when they arrived: the offshore team flew in from Friday afternoon and evening and were hands-on for the entire weekend, carrying equipment, handling the registration desk, and running workshops. They were not remote contributors who turned up to watch. They were part of the crew. Between us we did nearly everything, Allahumma baarik. Content creation, marketing, design, web development, the ticketing system, the giveaway platform, video and graphics, print. We were blessed with a multi-skilled team, and that single fact is responsible for more of the cost saving than any negotiation we did. We had built and assembled a decentralised team. No head office. No single point of coordination. Work moved to whoever was best placed to do it, in whichever time zone they happened to be in. The weekly sync was what made part-time effort add up to a finished event, because it forced everyone to show progress out loud, every week.

We picked a date first, but privately - a weekend all the core team could genuinely commit to. Then we went looking for a venue, and we did not announce anything until that venue was signed. Only after the venue was ours did we start approaching speakers. I know the temptation is to announce early and build momentum. Don't. A date you've announced and can't honour costs you more trust than a late announcement costs you attendance, and approaching speakers before you have a venue means asking people to commit to something that doesn't exist yet. Get the room, then announce, then build the programme inside it. Once the date was public, though, it became immovable, and everything else got negotiated against it. For security reasons, we kept the venue location private and only disclosed it to ticket holders.

The team we built, and the one we're still building

Something we thought about deliberately, and which I don't think gets talked about enough: who was actually in the team. We tried to build diversity into it from the start - geography, ethnicity, background, madhhab, and most importantly diversity of thought. That mattered to us for a practical reason as much as a principled one. A group that only recruits people who already think identically produces an echo chamber, makes worse decisions, and starts to look from the outside like a cult. We are a community with a shared concern about riba and surveillance, and within that there is a great deal of honest disagreement, which we accommodate rather than suppress. The gap we haven't closed is gender. We would love to have sisters properly represented on the organising team, and we tried: we published articles, we reached out across forums and community groups, we asked. The response was slower than we hoped, but alhamdulillah we now have a handful of sisters who have come forward and could get more involved in future events and initiatives. That is progress, not a solved problem, and I'd rather write it down as an open gap than quietly leave it out of the story. If you're copying this playbook, build that in from the first week rather than noticing it in month three, as we did.

What the backlog actually looked like

Everything lived on one shared board.

Housekeeping was the longest list by a distance, and hardly any of it is interesting. Fire exits. Lapel mics. A table for the book stall. Nobody comes home from a conference talking about the podium, but get a couple of those wrong and the day feels amateurish in a way delegates can sense without being able to name. The glamorous work - the programme, the speakers - took a fraction of the effort that the boring work did.

The venue problem

Finding a venue willing to host a Muslim Bitcoin conference is harder than it should be. Say the word to a booking manager and you are competing with every scam, every collapsed exchange and every headline of the last decade. Some venues declined outright. Others asked questions they would never ask of a traditional 'Islamic Finance' or Tech Fest event. Within the Muslim community the difficulty compounds. Bitcoin still carries a reputation as something controversial, speculative, or at best religiously unsettled, and a venue that serves that community reads a booking request through that lens. We were, in a small and frustrating way, running into exactly the misconception the Summit exists to correct. The event was difficult to host for precisely the reason the event needed to happen. The venue search was simply the first place the work had to be done. There was also the unglamorous half of logistics. We arranged accommodation for core team members travelling in, and moved every piece of equipment and every prop to the venue ourselves. Nobody writes articles about who carried the boxes, but the boxes do not carry themselves, and the budget assumes they will not be hired out.

Where the money went

I'm not going to publish our actual numbers, but I'll tell you where the money went and roughly in what order, because that's the useful part anyway. Venue hire and catering were far and away the biggest two lines. Between them they ate most of the budget, and I'd spend it the same way again. The catering decision is worth explaining. Our venue provided the food and cooked it on the premises, which meant it came out fresh and properly hot rather than sitting in trays losing heat since the morning. Anyone who has been to a conference knows the difference, and it is the kind of thing people remember about a day long after they've forgotten which panel said what. We also ran a reception area with tea, coffee and water available all day, and seated the room cabaret style - round tables rather than rows. That last one costs you capacity, and it is worth it. People talk to each other at a round table. They stare at the back of someone's head in a row.

On the income side: ticket sales at £50 and £70, plus community contributions. We ran early bird pricing until 1 August, then standard. No corporate sponsorship, no grant, no debt. And here's the thing I want to be straight about, because an article like this is worthless if it's only the flattering half: we did not even break even. Ticket income came nowhere near covering what the weekend cost, and we knew it wouldn't when we set the prices. £50 for the Saturday and £70 for the weekend, lunch included, was never a number arrived at by dividing costs by expected attendance. We picked it by asking what a family in this community could actually afford on a Saturday, and then worked backwards. You can price an event to break even or you can price it so the people you built it for can walk through the door. We couldn't do both, so we chose. If we'd charged what the weekend genuinely cost per head, a good number of the people in that room would not have been in that room, and the ones most likely to have stayed home are the ones who most needed to hear it. The core team picked up the shortfall out of our own pockets. I'm not saying that for sympathy - we made the decision deliberately and we'd make it again. I'm saying it because "community-funded" can sound like the money appeared from somewhere, and it didn't. Somebody always pays. In our case it was us, and we'd rather carry that than price people out of the room. So work out who is carrying the gap before you set your ticket price, not after the invoices land. If the answer is nobody, you don't have a budget yet. Notice what never appears in that budget at all. No agency. No event production company. No designer, no video editor, no web developer, no ticketing platform taking a cut. Those are the lines that would have doubled the budget, and we didn't pay them because we didn't have to.

What we refused to pay for

Run the numbers on a conference the ordinary way and a surprising share of the budget never touches the room. It goes on software: a ticketing platform taking a cut of every sale, an audience polling tool charged per attendee, a survey product, a competition platform, an email service, a landing page builder. Each is a modest fee. Together they can add up to thousands, and every one of them puts your delegates' data on someone else's server. We built ours instead, on hosting we already paid for: * *The giveaway platform.* Entry missions, referral links with per-entrant tracking, bonus entries for following sponsors, knowledge-level capture, and a random draw after close. Commercial equivalents charge monthly and take the data. * *The feedback survey system.* Two survey pages, a submit handler and an admin dashboard, so we owned the results rather than renting access to them. * *All brand, slide and print design.* The schedule graphics, the Escape Riba and Discover Bitcoin material, the Digital Hijrah leaflet, the stage backdrops, the full Day 2 workshop deck. Built in-house on a shared template. * *The promotional videos and the campaign itself.* No agency, no media buy.

I want to be honest about the cost of this, because "we built it ourselves" is the sort of line that sounds free and is not. It cost evenings and weekends. Time away from family and friends. If you do not have someone on the team who can build, paying for the tools is the correct decision and you should make it without embarrassment. But money wasn't really the reason. We spent two days telling people to leave surveillance platforms, self-host, and stop handing their data to middlemen. If we'd collected their names and emails on a platform that monetises exactly that, we'd have been talking nonsense. Nobody would have known. That's sort of the point - it was the one place where cheating would have been invisible, which made it the place that mattered. There's a bigger point here: we didn't only talk about decentralisation and sovereign architecture from the stage. We ran the event that way. Think about what the conventional route looks like: you hire an agency or a consultancy, and everything routes through them. They own the relationships, they own the platforms, they own your delegate data, and they take a margin on every piece of it. One central intermediary, sitting between you and everything you are trying to do - which is, structurally, exactly the arrangement we spent two days arguing against. What we did instead was the sovereign version. The team was distributed across the UK, the US, Denmark and elsewhere, and each person brought a speciality rather than a job title: design here, development there, content, video, logistics, community. The platforms were ours - ticketing, giveaway, feedback - running on hosting we controlled, holding data we could delete when we said we would. That isn't a cost-saving dressed up as a principle. It is genuinely why the thing was possible at the price. Decentralised means you use whatever capability the network already has instead of renting it back from a middleman, and the network - our community - already had almost everything we needed.

Speakers: handpicked, not bought

Not one speaker was paid a fee. Every one of them was asked personally, by someone on the team who knew their work. This is the part people assume must be the hardest, and it was the easiest. Scholars, economists, developers and practitioners said yes because the invitation was specific: here is the argument we are making, here is the session we think only you can take, here is who you will be on stage with. Nobody was offered a slot because they had a following. Several people with large followings were not asked, because the session did not need them. Handpicking does something to a programme that money cannot buy. Two things happened that no budget could have purchased. Simon Dixon has not presented at a conference in years and was planning to join us remotely. He turned up in person, unannounced, and the room knew what it meant. And Tarek el Diwany came as our guest - the man whose work has been the inspiration behind the global anti-riba movement for over thirty years, sitting in a room full of people carrying on what he started. Neither of those is a booking. They are what happens when people judge that something is worth their presence. You cannot plan for it, but you can build the kind of event that earns it, and the way you do that is by being serious about the argument rather than the production values. It also means you must be willing to hear no, and to hear it late. Build the programme around sessions rather than names and a late drop-out costs you a replacement, not a redesign. That's exactly what happened when two of our originally scheduled speakers had to drop out for different reasons. It's a risk we had to factor into our event planning. One thing we would say plainly to anyone copying this: unpaid works only when you are honest about what you are asking for and when the cause is genuinely shared. We were not extracting free labour from professionals. We were asking people who already believe this to spend a weekend with the community that needs to hear it, and we covered what we could. That is a different transaction, and it does not scale to every event.

A flexible schedule

Look at the Day 1 running order and you will notice something that seems wasteful: breaks everywhere. Ten minutes after the first keynote. Ten after the first panel. Breaks between almost every session, plus lunch and the prayer breaks. That was deliberate, and it is the single best piece of event design we did. A conference schedule with no slack is a row of dominoes. One keynote runs eight minutes long and every session after it starts late, the keynote after lunch gets cut, the afternoon compresses, and by the closing Q&A you are either forty minutes behind or you have quietly stolen the time from the last session of the day. Built-in breaks are not downtime. A session that overran simply ate into the following break and allowed us to re-synchronise the day, with minor intervention. The breaks earn their place twice over, because the conversations in them are half of why people came. Nobody flies in from another country to sit in silence facing forwards. I should add that we only applied this discipline properly to Day 1. Day 2 we treated more loosely, and it cost us - more on that below. Murphy's law, or Sod's law, applies to events more than to almost anything else. Whatever can go wrong will, usually in the fifteen minutes when you are not looking at it. You can prepare for a great deal of it, and you should: walk the venue, check the AV, write the run sheet, agree who makes the call when something breaks. But you cannot prepare for all of it, and the second half of the answer is temperament rather than planning. Expect the unexpected. Stay flexible. Accept that things will go wrong on the day, and that how your team responds in that moment matters more than how neat the plan was. The same goes for afterwards. Take the feedback, including the uncomfortable parts, and treat it as a gift rather than a verdict. We ran a post-event debrief as a team, and I'd put that on any list of things we got right: what worked, what didn't, what we'd change, while it was still fresh. A lesson you don't record is a lesson you will pay for twice. If you take one operational lesson from this piece, take this one. Put more breaks in the schedule than you think you need, and build the programme so that any one person can be missing from it.

Getting the word out with no ad budget

We spent nothing on advertising. Not on X, not on Meta, not on Google. The entire campaign was organic, and it ran on four things. *Daily posting with a plan.* One post a day in the final stretch, each with a job: a speaker, an objection answered, a Jumu'ah reflection, a deadline. It's a good idea to write them in advance. The posts went out on X, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Nostr and other platforms. *Speakers as the distribution network.* Speakers with their own audiences will out-reach any budget you could plausibly have bought. We wrote the posts so they were easy to share. *The giveaway.* Companies in our community who donated prizes: a two-night stay at The Bitcoin Shepherd Guest House as the grand prize, Blockstream Jade hardware wallets, Bitcoin books, t-shirts, and free sats for anyone who installed a Lightning wallet and submitted an address. The giveaway's design is worth dwelling on, because it was not a raffle. Entries were earned by completing missions, and the missions were the campaign: follow and share on X, Nostr, Instagram and TikTok, follow the sponsors, and install a Lightning wallet. Referral links gave five extra entries per friend. Entries had to use the same email as the ticket booking, and prizes were collected in person at the Summit. Every entry was a ticket holder, and receiving the prize required attendance. We deleted the entrant data after the event, as we had said we would. The free-sats mission deserves a note of its own. To claim it, a person had to install a Lightning wallet and give us a valid Lightning address. It is onboarding dressed as a prize, and some number of people took self-custody of Bitcoin for the first time in order to enter a competition. *Podcasts and live television.* We went on Islam Channel, and we did podcasts. Long-form does something no advert can - it lets the actual argument be made, at length, to people who have never come across it before. Several attendees told us they'd come off the back of one appearance. All of it was free, and all of it came from asking. And this is where I want to name two people, because neither of them had to do what they did. Azad Islam, from Simon Dixon's team, premiered the Majlis podcast across all of their associated social channels. That single decision put the argument in front of an audience we could never have reached on our own, and you can draw a line from it to people who ended up in the room. It made a huge difference and we can't thank them enough. May Allah SWT bless them all. The two Islam Channel interviews came about through sister Tehreem Noor, who we met through councillor Shukry Haleemdeen. She arranged them. We had no media contacts, no PR agency and no budget - what we had was somebody in the community who knew somebody, and who was willing to pick up the phone. That's a lesson worth stating plainly, because it's easy to miss when you're deep in a niche. You need allies outside your own bubble. Not everyone who helps you has to be a Bitcoiner. Some of the most valuable support we got came from people with no particular interest in Bitcoin at all, who simply believed the community deserved a hearing and were well connected enough to arrange one. Build those relationships before you need them, and treat them as what they are: a gift, not a transaction.

Day 2 could've gone better

Day 1 is where the argument gets made. Day 2 is where it gets acted on. The gap between those two things is where almost every movement dies: a room full of convinced people who go home, mean to do something about it, and do not. Every delegate received a lanyard with a mini booklet to take home. Wallet recommendations were checked against BDS boycott status as well as whether they were open source, because telling a community to escape one unjust system while buying from another would be incoherent. And the Nostr client we recommended is maintained by a solo indie developer rather than a funded company. Day 2 did not go completely to plan. We went off script early, people turned up late, the first session ran long, and by the afternoon we were out of time. The Nostr and GrapheneOS workshops got rushed when they deserved room to breathe, and the Linux workshop got dropped altogether. We built excellent material and didn't have time to rehearse it as a team against a clock. A conference talk is a known quantity; a workshop expands to fill whatever space you give it, because people ask questions, their phones behave differently from yours, and someone always gets stuck on one of the steps. So: rehearse your workshops, time them properly, and stick to the brief. We applied real discipline to the Day 1 schedule and not as much to Day 2. Although the more I sit with it, the more I think the timing wasn't really the problem. The problem was that we were trying to fit an entire event inside half a day. Six pillars. Wallets, nodes, identity, private communication, de-Googled phones, Linux, self-hosting, sovereign AI. Any one of those deserves a morning of its own, and we gave the whole migration only half a day. So the thing we're now seriously considering is a standalone Digital Hijrah event - its own weekend, properly structured, with room to take each pillar at the pace it actually needs rather than sprinting through them, inshaAllah.

It was never only about Bitcoin

The name on the door says Bitcoin, and people arrive expecting a monetary conference. They are half right, and the half they are missing is the reason the event exists. Riba is not the only thing extracted from us. The same arrangement that creates money as debt also runs on a business model where the product is the person: your attention, your location, your contacts, your messages, your search history, and now your prompts. Surveillance capitalism and the debt-based monetary system are not two separate problems that happen to be fashionable to criticise together. They are the same move, made twice. In both, something that should belong to you is quietly made into someone else's asset, and in both you are told the arrangement is simply how the modern world works. Digital Hijrah is the response: a migration away from surveillance capitalism toward self-sovereignty, using open, ethical and privacy-respecting tools. Hijrah is the right word deliberately. It was a migration undertaken because staying meant living under conditions that made practising your deen (way of life) impossible, and it was not a retreat. It was a relocation to the place where the community could finally be built properly. The migration has six pillars, and it's something that we'd like to cover more deeply over the coming months:

Put the pillars next to each other and the shape of the thing becomes clear. Bitcoin is the first pillar, not the whole building. A person who holds their own keys but runs their life through an ad-funded phone, an identity that can be deleted by a platform, messages read by whoever hosts them, and an AI that logs every question they are afraid to ask aloud has escaped exactly one of six enclosures.

Who we actually are

One last thing, because I think it reframes everything above. The Bitcoin Majlis is not a registered corporation. It is not an organisation in any formal sense. There is no company behind it, no board, no legal entity, no office. We are a completely decentralised, grassroots community. We have nobody on a payroll. No staff. Not one person was paid for any of this. Everyone who built this weekend did it as a volunteer, in the hours around their job and their family, and for most of us that wasn't charity or networking or profile-building. It was ibaadah. An act of worship. That is the only budget line that genuinely explains how a two-day international conference happens for under £15,000. It also explains the mistakes. A volunteer community without a professional events team will get things wrong, and we did. We know we made mistakes, and I've tried to set the honest ones out here rather than tidy them away. Please forgive us for our shortcomings.

Thank you

An event that costs under £15,000 to run is not cheap. It is subsidised, heavily, by people who were not paid. To our speakers, panellists and helpers, who gave a weekend and asked for nothing: Harris Irfan, Simon Dixon, Safdar Alam, Shaykh Mu'aawiyah Tucker, Shaykh Abdulwahid Stephenson, Michael Howe, Bashar Humeid, Abdullah ibn Oda, Subhan Tariq, Tee Politics, Maher Janajri, Hasnain Dhalla, Shukry Haleemdeen, Adam Mashrique, Fraz Mahmud, Muhammed Khan, Imaan Mohammed, Sumaiya Islam, Sara Adam, Ahsan Mohammed, Musa Mahmud, Mokhtar Naamani, and the Bitcoin Majlis community. JazakumAllahu khayran. And to Tarek el Diwany, who joined us as our guest. More than thirty years ago he was making this argument when there was no movement to make it to, and much of what was said from our stage rests on ground he cleared. To Azad and the team around Simon Dixon, for premiering the Majlis podcast across their channels, and to sister Tehreem, for the Islam Channel interviews. None of you had to. May Allah SWT bless you all. To our community sponsors, who contributed without asking what they would get for it: Bitcoin Majlis, Blockchainology, The Bitcoin Guide, Frostsnap, The Bitcoin Shepherd, Bitcoin Lawyr, Rizq Revolution, Grynvault and My Crypto Tax. And to everyone who bought a ticket. You didn't cover the cost of the weekend - we never expected you to - but you were the reason nobody else could buy influence over that programme. An event with no sponsor to please answers to the room, and the room was you. The current system cannot be saved. It can be succeeded. We will see you at the next one, inshaAllah. May Allah SWT accept it from us and from you all. Ameen.

Great read and a really good summary of what took place ...

2026-10-16T15:22:25Z

Great read and a really good summary of what took place

quoting
naddr1qp…x6hl

This was probably the most engaging summit we've ever been to. And strangely enough, we don't think we were quite prepared for what the summit actually turned out to be, especially with the diversity of people who attended. We had people flying into London from Bulgaria, Spain, France, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Australia, and many other places. We even had two brothers who flew in from Jerusalem!

We were truly humbled that so many people would travel from all over the world just to attend the Muslim Bitcoin Summit learn and engage, and be part of this peculiar little Muslim Bitcoiner space that we've been cultivating over the years. We honestly had trouble processing that we managed to pull all of this off. A special thank you to brothers Ashik and Michael for their Herculean efforts in making this happen.

The first day of the summit went very well. We left plenty of time for questions, and the audience was remarkably engaged, alhamdulillah. We won't go over each talk in detail, as inshaAllah they'll eventually be uploaded for everyone to watch. Besides, going through the contents of every presentation would be somewhat redundant, especially for those already familiar with the topics and discussions we've been having in the Bitcoin Majlis space. But we did want to begin this reflection by highlighting two peculiar things we noticed about the talks on the first day, both of which we found quite interesting.

The first is that none of the talks actually covered the basics of Bitcoin. Like, there wasn't a Bitcoin 101 presentation explaining the architecture of consensus, nodes, the timechain, mining, or any of the usual introductory material. We found this quite funny actually. We could imagine some complete newbie walking into the summit expecting to learn how Bitcoin works, only to find Harris Irfan railing against Islamic banking, Safdar Alam questioning conventional narratives around sovereignty and Bitcoin adoption, Simon discussing Bitcoin in relation to geopolitics and Islamic principles, Tee exploring network states, and Abdullah examining the rather disappointing state of Bitcoin adoption among Muslims around the world.

It's almost as if we all collectively understood, without ever explicitly agreeing on it, that explaining the basics of Bitcoin wasn't what we were supposed to be doing in that room at that particular moment. And to be fair, that information is already widely available online. Anyone can watch a few videos or listen to podcasts or read a book or even ask an AI to generate an entire lesson plan covering the technical foundations of Bitcoin. We did feel a little bad for any newcomers who might have attended expecting something more introductory. But perhaps this wasn't such a bad thing after all. We received some wonderful feedback from newcomers who found the discussions genuinely engaging and unlike anything they had encountered at other Muslim conferences. So perhaps this should be considered a major win. Talking about the basics of Bitcoin for the millionth time would have been absolutely boring anyway.

The second observation is somewhat related. The talks were generally adversarial and strangely cypherpunk in both form and substance. Now, we don't mean adversarial in some hostile or anarchist sense, nor cypherpunk in the strictly technical sense of cryptography or writing code. What we mean is that the speakers were thinking in terms of resilience and sovereignty, and the possibility of building structures that operate outside, or perhaps beyond, the familiar institutions of the state.

Even the discussion about UK tax regulation wasn't simply about lobbying for a more favorable regulatory environment. There wasn't some collective call to go outside and protest, or vote for a particular political party or beg policymakers to recognize our existence. The talks were concerned with empowering individuals and local Muslim communities, exploring ways of thinking and organizing that didn't depend on existing institutional/regulatory structures or groveling before Muslim leaders and influencers.

And of course, we should mention that nobody there was trying to sell a course, or a subscription, or some elaborate Islamic financial product. We were simply doing our own thing, exploring possibilities for Muslim empowerment that were compatible with Islamic ethics while trying to imagine, and eventually build, something new.

On a more personal note, it was quite surreal to finally meet some of the people whose work has influenced these discussions over the years. Seeing Simon in person and watching his presentation was something else. Meeting Harris Irfan was wonderful, and I also finally got to meet Tarek El-Diwany, although I only managed to speak with him for a few minutes.

There was a funny moment when I thanked Tarek for writing his book. I looked around the room and told him, "You know, Tarek, look around you. Your book helped spark the Muslim Bitcoin Summit. You helped start this!" He seemed genuinely surprised by that. Of course, I gave him a copy of my book.

I mention this because it illustrates something that we've been thinking about quite a bit lately. Ideas can circulate for decades, passing between people who may never meet, before eventually finding themselves expressed through something completely unexpected. And here we were, years later, gathered in London with Muslims from all over the world, discussing Bitcoin, riba, sovereignty, and the possibility of building something beyond the monetary and institutional arrangements we've inherited.

Actually, we wanted to explore this a little further. Almost everyone we've met through Bitcoin Majlis seems to operate with an implicit understanding that what we're doing is, in some sense, an act of ibadah.

What we mean is that we certainly weren't organizing this summit to become famous, penetrate the Muslim influencer class, or make money or whatever. As we've mentioned elsewhere, organizing these summits actually costs us quite a bit of sats, which probably would have been put to better financial use by simply HODLing.

But that's not why we're doing this.

By ibadah, we mean that we genuinely understand this work, when undertaken with the right intentions, as a form of worship and service to our Creator. Many of us feel that Allah SWT has placed us in a particular position, at a particular moment in history, where the Ummah desperately needs to be awakened to the dangers of riba money, the possibilities presented by Bitcoin, and the wider monetary, technological, social, and political questions that inevitably follow from taking these matters seriously.

And perhaps this explains some of the energy that people were experiencing throughout the summit. There was something in that atrium that several attendees privately confided to us they simply hadn't experienced anywhere else.

One attendee, an actual Bitcoin OG from the Satoshi email era who had attended countless Bitcoin conferences over the years, went out of his way to tell us that this was the best gathering of Bitcoiners he'd ever attended. That was quite the compliment, and it left us rather awestruck, to say the least. Allahu Akbar!

And because this summit was unlike most Bitcoin conferences, or finance/tech conferences, many of the off stage conversations naturally revolved around questions concerning the nature of Bitcoin Majlis itself, questions that we'd already been wrestling with internally in the weeks leading up to the summit. We wrote last week:

nevent1qqsrcr9ywajzzfnkakhf2g5mm8nfurg3eqr9qtdpsv5nrudy9t6e2vgzyrsfy8tppmn92wtvltrvnyrmdtg37wsamethqq57z2zwdjhqleaa2qcyqqqqqqgu4t6n2

Obviously, attendees weren't asking these questions in this exact language, but the conversations kept returning to the same underlying concerns.

What are we? What is Bitcoin Majlis, really? What are we actually trying to accomplish beyond the general boundaries of our mission and vision? How do we get there? And perhaps most importantly, where do we go from here?

These sound like brutally simple questions, but attempting to answer them can reveal quite a lot. And actually, we're not going to pretend to have good answers to all of them right now. We don't. But we do hope to arrive at better answers as we continue experimenting and learning from what we've already built.

And no, this is not an invitation to indulge in endless Marxist philosophical word salad where nothing ever needs to be defined or whatever. We still need discernible principles, coherent objectives, and definable boundaries within which meaningful action can take place. In fact, we'd go so far as to argue that failing to seriously confront these questions could eventually lead to the stagnation or death of a movement. The recent struggles of The Progressive Bitcoiner offer a useful analogue here. Their experience with organizational continuity and sustaining a volunteer driven movement raises questions that we would be foolish to ignore: https://x.com/ktreywalsh/status/2100588044487201002

But one thing has become increasingly clear to us. We must keep experimenting. We shouldn't be afraid to try and build unfamiliar and new things. We shouldn't be afraid to develop entirely different ways of thinking about Bitcoin, especially as it relates to Muslim adoption.

Alhamdulillah, perhaps inadvertently, we think we've already begun operating within this framework. Many of the talks at the summit explored Bitcoin and adjacent subjects from a politically grounded, critical perspective that went far beyond the usual discussions of price or code. There was something almost post-punk about the whole thing, like in the willingness to challenge established conventions and experiment with new forms while remaining anchored to a set of principles.

And there was plenty of room for healthy skepticism and disagreement. Safdar and Tee, for example, brought a more measured and critical approach to questions about sovereignty, network states, and Bitcoin adoption, which we thought was particularly valuable. So it turns out we're not quite as toxic as the shitcoiners and no-coiners would have you believe!

But we must remain vigilant, especially when considering the rather unsettling question at the end of our presummit reflection, that is, how do we survive success without being reterritorialized back into the system we were trying to escape? (Micro)Strategy offers a rather amusing example of what this process can look like. Saylor and his army of suitcoiners seem convinced that they're revolutionizing finance because they've managed to insert the word Bitcoin into an increasingly elaborate collection of debt based financial instruments. Their obsession with engineering new ways to extract yield and leverage from Bitcoin has become so all-consuming that they barely seem capable of talking about Bitcoin itself anymore. It's always digital capital, digital credit, digital assets, digital this and digital that, an endless procession of financial abstractions that somehow manages to reproduce the logic of the very system Bitcoin was supposed to allow us to escape. These self appointed architects of the Bitcoin financial renaissance are increasingly indistinguishable from the fiat bankers they imagine themselves replacing.

And this extends beyond Saylor, of course. An increasing number of Bitcoin companies have embraced yield products, collateralized lending, and other debt-based instruments, encouraging Bitcoiners to borrow more fiat against their holdings. But don't worry MB, some of them pay their yield in Bitcoin, so apparently that makes everything fine!

In their misguided attempts to break away from fiat, while hilariously presenting themselves as cypherpunk + anti-state innovators, they remain completely dependent on the monetary structures and incentives of the fiat system. They've changed the asset without seriously challenging the machinery surrounding it. And this is precisely the trap we're concerned about. Something can adopt the language, imagery, and even some of the technology of Bitcoin while remaining fundamentally subordinate to the same institutional logic it claims to transcend.

So, is Bitcoin Majlis unknowingly walking into this same trap of being subordinated to the fiat industrial complex?

At this juncture, we do not think so, especially if the success of the summit is any indication. But if we're not careful, the summit itself could eventually morph into another annual Muslim conference series, not unlike ISNA or ICNA, that continually reproduces itself without generating anything genuinely new or addressing the deeper problems of ummatic sovereignty and civilizational decline.

So if we find ourselves organizing the 47th annual Muslim Bitcoin Summit decades from now, complete with corporate sponsors, VIP passes, and the same panel discussions, that would probably be a very bad sign that this majlis has been thoroughly neutered!

So what do we do instead? Well, some of the most fruitful and passionate conversations happened after the formal conclusion of the summit, when attendees began discussing what we could actually build next.

One idea that we believe is worth pursuing is organizing more of our work around the concept of Digital Hijrah, as a way of introducing Bitcoin into the broader Muslim imaginary through a much wider set of technological and civilizational questions. Perhaps we need to be a little more subversive in our orange pilling.

We've even discussed the possibility of renaming the Muslim Bitcoin Summit to something like the Digital Hijrah Summit, which could substantially broaden the range of subjects and practical activities we could explore. Bitcoin would remain central to what we're doing, of course, but it would be situated within a much larger conversation about technological sovereignty, privacy, FOSS infrastructure, and the formation of Muslim communities that are less dependent on the systems we've spent so much time criticizing. We could also become more developer focused where we actively recruit Muslims capable of contributing to Bitcoin software, node infrastructure, mining, and other open source projects.

Something that particularly struck me personally was the interest people had in the NoorNote app that our brother Alp has been developing. I had the opportunity to demonstrate it at the summit, and people were genuinely impressed by his approach to building outside the architecture of legacy social media, or LSM. But what seemed to fascinate people even more was the relationship between the developer and the users. I could publicly request a feature, discuss it directly with the person writing the software, zap him sats for his work, and those zapped sats could then be used to buy kyc free compute. No corporate intermediary, no subscription model designed to capture users, no elaborate bureaucracy governing what could or couldn't be built. There was a feedback loop there that people immediately recognized as something worth exploring further. A small example, perhaps, but one that points toward an entirely different way of cultivating and sustaining Muslim technological infrastructure.

We were also pleasantly surprised by how many attendees were already using GrapheneOS. And once we began talking about Nostr, it seemed to make immediate sense to many of them. There was already a degree of familiarity with the broader principles of technological sovereignty, even among people who weren't particularly technical.

This brings us to something else that we think deserves considerably more attention going forward, which is the workshops. To be fair, we were a little sloppy with how we organized them. We simply didn't allocate enough time, and although the workshops were excellent and full of useful knowledge, they didn't quite accomplish everything we had hoped they would. Muaawiyah Tucker somehow managed to make elliptical curve mathematics interesting, which is an achievement in itself. We were surprised by how engaged the audience remained throughout his session. But next time, whatever event or gathering we decide to organize, we need to place much greater emphasis on the practical workshops. Ideally, we'd have concurrent sessions running, WITH BREAKS THIS TIME, allowing attendees to gravitate toward whatever they find most useful, whether that's basics of transactions, public and private keys, hardware wallet security, running Nostr, installing Linux or GrapheneOS, or learning to operate their own nodes and other sovereign infrastructure.

We really can't afford to slack here, because the workshops are arguably what make these gatherings a fundamentally different animal from the usual Muslim conference circuit. Anyone can fill a conference hall with speakers talking about empowerment and Islamic revival. We've had decades of that already. What matters is whether the people leaving that conference are actually more capable than when they arrived. Can they secure their own wealth? Can they run their own infrastructure? Can they communicate without relying on surveillance platforms? Can they teach someone else to do the same? This is where the cultivation of cypherpunk and lunarpunk sovereignty becomes an actual lived practice. The workshops should function almost like small laboratories of Digital Hijrah, where ideas become habits, habits become competencies, and those competencies eventually spread through families and local communities.

And perhaps this is also where the question of Bitcoin Majlis becoming an assemblage rather than a conventional organization could get some concrete meaning.

We don't necessarily need everyone attending the summit to become a member of some formal institution, nor do we need every new initiative to operate under the Bitcoin Majlis name. We'd much rather see people acquire the knowledge, confidence, and relationships necessary to build things independently, and then see those initiatives develop their own connections with others doing similar work.

Like in previous summits, we had several attendees express an interest in organizing similar gatherings in their own countries, particularly in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. This seems like exactly the right direction to us. There are enormous opportunities to reach Muslim populations outside the usual Western conference circuit, and it would be rather absurd for an ideology concerned with decentralization+sovereignty to insist that every gathering take place in some Western city.

Perhaps the next gathering happens in Malaysia, Oman, or somewhere entirely unexpected. Perhaps it only happens online. Perhaps it isn't even called the Muslim Bitcoin Summit. Perhaps smaller regional majalis, workshops, meetups, and developer gatherings begin proliferating on their own, connected through shared principles and infrastructure rather than a single centralized organization. That would allow us to grow sideways rather than simply upwards, which is perhaps one of the more important distinctions we've been trying to articulate.

Exactly where the next gathering takes place remains to be seen.

And we should also be patient. Breaking away from the old and forming something new takes time. Cultivating the soil before the seed can even be planted takes time, and it can be quite boring when all you have to work with is a pile of dirt and barren land. There will be periods when it feels like nothing particularly exciting is happening, when we're simply running nodes, stacking sats, experimenting with software, organizing meetings online, and having conversations with the same handful of people. But perhaps those seemingly mundane activities are precisely what allow something much larger to eventually take root. After all, we're not trying to manufacture another organization that can boast about its membership numbers, annual conferences, institutional partnerships, and other bureaucratic metrics. We want to cultivate something capable of reproducing itself without requiring our constant supervision, something that can proliferate through the Ummah in forms we may not even recognize or anticipate today.

And if this whole experiment eventually succeeds, perhaps the most meaningful evidence of our success won't be how large Bitcoin Majlis becomes, but how many new things emerge that no longer need Bitcoin Majlis at all.

So that's where we are. We're excited, but admittedly also a little anxious, to see where all of this goes. The summit left us with more questions than answers, but perhaps that's exactly what we needed. We came together expecting to organize a Bitcoin conference and left wondering whether we're actually participating in the early formation of something much more interesting. There's still an enormous amount of work to do, and we certainly don't have everything figured out. But let's keep rethinking, recruiting, promoting, experimenting, synthesizing, and building the new and unfamiliar outside the confines of the old and familiar.

And to anyone who attended, or even those who didn't get the chance to attend, Muslim or non-Muslim, we'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts about where this peculiar experiment should go next. Alhamdulillah for everything. May Allah SWT accept our efforts and allow something beneficial to emerge from them.

A must read. This perfectly explains the need for the Muslim ...

2026-09-01T19:56:43Z

A must read. This perfectly explains the need for the Muslim Bitcoin Summit

quoting
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Brother Michael's essay made a fairly straightforward argument, even if the implications of that argument are not straightforward at all. The monetary system we live under is structurally bound up with riba, and because that monetary system sits underneath nearly every other institution we interact with, the effects of riba do not remain confined to mortgages, credit cards, loans, or the more obvious transactions that Muslims have traditionally been taught to scrutinize. They seep outward into family life, saving, charity, business, Waqfs, our time preference, and eventually into the institutional forms of the constitution of the Ummah itself. Bitcoin, from this perspective, becomes interesting to Muslims not because it is a speculative asset to get rich, but because it offers a monetary system with very different properties, one that is not issued as debt and cannot be diluted at the discretion of governments or banks.

But once we accept that argument, even provisionally, another question follows, and I think this question is perhaps more interesting for understanding why the Muslim Bitcoin Summit exists in the first place.

What else is there?

When we ask that question, we really mean it in two related senses. First, if the problem begins with debt-based fiat money, what monetary alternative actually exists that does not simply reproduce the same architecture under another name? The previous essay made the case that Bitcoin is presently the most serious answer we have found. But there is another question that follows from it, and this is the one we are more interested in here: what else exists within the Muslim imaginary that takes a critique of the existing order and joins it to a set of practices ordinary Muslims can begin adopting without first capturing a government, or receiving institutional permission, or waiting for some future political settlement or moment?

We do not mean this in some melodramatic sense, as though Muslims have never built anything worthwhile in the modern world, or as though every Islamic institution outside of Bitcoin has failed and ought to be abandoned. That would plainly be ridiculous. There are Muslim charities that feed people, Islamic schools and seminaries that preserve knowledge, scholars who teach and issue fatawa, businesses employing thousands of Muslims, institutions distributing zakat, activists defending Muslim interests, and countless local masajid doing the unglamorous work of holding communities together. These things are good, and none of what follows should be interpreted as an argument against them.

Nonetheless, there is a deeper problem which, in our view, very few Muslim institutions are actually equipped to confront, insofar as almost all of them operate downstream from a monetary and technological order whose basic assumptions they simply accept as given.

An Islamic charity still holds its funds in fiat money. A Muslim startup still relies on banks, payment processors, app stores, cloud providers, subscription models, centralized user accounts, analytics companies and whatever other layers have become necessary to make a modern software slop company function. An Islamic school still has to operate within a regulatory and financial system that it did not design. A political movement ultimately has to win elections, influence governments, lobby or bribe the state, or somehow convince people who already control institutions of power to adopt its program. Islamic finance, perhaps most obviously, begins with the modern banking system as an established fact and then spends enormous intellectual and institutional energy trying to determine how Muslims can operate within it.

Be that as it may, there is an important distinction here between asking how Muslims can survive inside an existing system and asking whether Muslims should accept the structure of that system in the first place.

This is one reason why Islamic finance, as both a concept and application, has always seemed somewhat unsatisfying to many of us. Its problem is not simply that one may object to this murabaha contract or that sukuk structure, or accuse one financial product of resembling conventional interest too closely. Those arguments have gone on for decades and will likely continue long after we are gone. The more fundamental limitation is that Islamic finance usually begins with fiat money, central banking, inflation, debt markets and the architecture of modern finance as immovable features of reality, and from there asks how a Muslim might transact or invest without technically crossing one particular juridical boundary.

In other words, the question they have settled for is, how do we make modern finance halal? But, what we are trying to ask is something closer to: why should modern finance be the starting point at all?

The same institutional limitation exists elsewhere, although in different forms. Scholars and students of knowledge are indispensable insofar as we need them to preserve the deen, teach us its limits, explain its obligations and prevent us from simply making Islam conform to whatever technological enthusiasm happens to be fashionable this decade. But scholars are not software engineers, protocol designers, network architects or monetary economists merely by virtue of being scholars, and many scholarly institutions themselves are dependent upon governments, universities, donors, banks and regulatory regimes which naturally narrow the range of possibilities they are capable of seriously entertaining. Expecting the scholarly class to design the technical means of exiting the monetary system misunderstands the function of scholarship in much the same way that expecting a programmer to independently derive fiqh from first principles would misunderstand the function of programming.

Academia has a similar problem. It is very good at producing papers, describing crises, critiquing modernity, organizing conferences, forming committees and identifying an ever-growing vocabulary with which to explain why things are bad. Some (little) of that work is useful. But at some point we have to notice that a Muslim can read a hundred books and papers about financial and technological sovereignty and remain completely dependent on the same bank, the same operating system, the same social media platform and the same monetary infrastructure after finishing the hundredth paper.

And then there is Muslim tech, which perhaps deserves its own particular frustration because the possibilities ought to be so much greater than what we usually end up getting.

Almost always, "Muslim tech" means taking the same centralized model already produced by Silicon Valley, attaching Islamic branding to it, locking Muslims into a subscription, gathering the same user data and selling it to an Israeli tech startup, relying on the same cloud infrastructure and app stores, and then presenting the result as some kind of civilizational achievement because there is an Arabic word in the logo. We can make a Muslim social network, a Muslim AI assistant, a Muslim fintech app, a Muslim productivity platform, and yet insofar as the underlying infrastructure is still owned and permissioned by somebody else, the basic relationship has not changed very much. We have essentially created Muslim content inside a machine belonging to someone else, usually of Zionist orientation.

This is the point we are trying to get at. The problem facing the Ummah is not that we lack organizations, institutions, conferences, projects, apps, scholars, political theories or economic proposals. We have plenty of them. The problem is that most of these efforts remain subordinate to the monetary and technological substrate they claim, in one way or another, to resist.

And here we find that Bitcoin produces something rather unusual, because it does not merely give us another opinion about what is wrong. It gives us a certain praxis that we need to be paying attention to.

Look, we can spend another fifty years discussing the harms of riba, or we can begin reducing our exposure to riba-based money right now. We can complain about banks, or we can learn self-custody. We can discuss the dangers of centralized monetary authorities, or we can run a node and verify the monetary rules ourselves. We can criticize surveillance capitalism, or we can begin using free and open-source software, encrypted communications, self-hosted services and permissionless protocols. We can lament the weakness of Muslim institutions, or we can start forming direct economic and social relationships with other Muslims without waiting for a government ministry or a corporate platform to coordinate us.

None of these things individually constitutes some grand Islamic revival, obviously. Running Linux is not some act of clever statecraft, and operating a Bitcoin node does not magically restore the Waqf or resolve the political problems or conflicts of the Muslim world. But that is not really the point.

The point is that these practices begin altering our relationship with the institutions around us.

If a Muslim learns that he can hold his savings without a bank, something has changed in his imagination. If he can verify his own money without trusting a central authority, then perhaps verification should matter elsewhere too. If he can communicate over protocols that are not owned by a single corporation, perhaps the social networks through which Muslims organize do not have to depend upon a corporate moderator, an algorithm, or some gay Jewish oligarch in California deciding what is acceptable speech. If he can run software whose code is available to inspect and modify, perhaps technological dependence is not simply a fact of nature.

This is one way of understanding what we have called Digital Hijrah. It is not a rejection of technology, nor is it a fantasy of disconnecting from the modern world and retreating into some electronically fortified village where everyone runs a server and refuses to speak to anyone using Windows. It is, rather, the gradual and recurring process of recognizing which dependencies are unnecessary, which dependencies are dangerous, which dependencies compromise our values, and then deliberately replacing them where alternatives exist.

Bitcoin happens to be the most obvious place to begin because money sits underneath so much of this. And Bitcoin also introduces another peculiar feature which I think makes the Muslim Bitcoin movement different from many previous attempts at revival, that is, the praxis contains within it a positive feedback loop.

Consider that most movements require their participants to sacrifice now for some victory which may or may not arrive later. Join the organization, attend the meetings, donate money, distribute pamphlets, campaign, build membership, persuade the public, and perhaps after twenty or fifty years the political circumstances will change and something meaningful will finally happen (looking at you, Hizb ut-Tahrir)

We contend that Bitcoin produces a rather different and unfamiliar dynamic.

A Muslim begins stacking sats, usually for very ordinary reasons. He wants to save money in something that cannot be debased, cool. Over time he becomes more attentive to his time preference because saving is no longer merely holding a melting unit and hoping to outrun inflation. He learns proper self-custody, which forces him to learn responsibility because there is no customer service department that can reverse his mistakes. He learns how Bitcoin works, perhaps starts running a node, and suddenly concepts such as verification, trust minimization and sovereignty become more than abstractions.

Then these habits begin spreading. He starts asking why his money should be self-custodied while his data is not. Why should his financial life be sovereign while his communications remain entirely dependent on permissioned platforms? Why should he verify Bitcoin but blindly trust Google or Apple that controls everything else he does? Why should Muslims complain about censorship while building their communities on infrastructure capable of censoring them?

Then he meets other Muslims asking the same questions. Perhaps they begin transacting with each other. Perhaps one starts a business. Perhaps another teaches self-custody. Another sets up a Lightning node and opens up a channel with a friend. Another organizes a local Majlis. Another starts a Nostr relay. Another begins thinking about how a Waqf might operate on a Bitcoin standard, or how a masjid treasury might use multisig custody, or how Muslims in different countries might transfer value directly without passing through layers of correspondent Jewish owned banks.

And here there is perhaps a third sense in which we can ask the question, what else is there? Once the exit is no longer merely theoretical and Muslims begin practicing it together, what else might begin forming around that practice?

Something interesting happens at this point because there are really two recursive processes reinforcing one another.

The first is material. People accumulate savings, acquire technical knowledge and competence, reduce dependencies, build businesses/organizations and develop the capacity to undertake projects that would have been harder before. The people participating in the movement can become materially stronger through participation in the movement itself, and each successful act of exit creates additional capacity for another act of exit.

The second is more social and communal. People who repeatedly practice these things together develop a common language, shared norms, technical competence, trust and eventually a kind of "digital asabiyyah." Shared praxis makes cooperation easier; successful cooperation strengthens trust; greater trust makes more ambitious forms of coordination possible; and those new forms of coordination further reinforce the shared culture which produced them in the first place.

We think the two loops feed one another. Material sovereignty gives the network greater capacity to act, while social cohesion makes that capacity easier to coordinate. The community gradually becomes both more capable and more cohesive through the very practices that define it.

We might call this something like "recursive sovereignty," or where every successful act of exit creates additional capacity for another act of exit, while the relationships formed through that process make collective action increasingly possible and harder to stop.

This is one of the reasons Bitcoin Majlis does not quite resemble the Muslim organizations we are used to. It is not a political party, an NGO, a corporation, a tariqa, an academic institution, or an organization asking Muslims to subordinate themselves to some new hierarchy. The "toxic" Muslim Bitcoin culture that has emerged is far looser than that, and at times admittedly much harsher. It consists of Muslims from different countries, theological orientations and social backgrounds who share some fairly uncompromising assumptions about riba, Bitcoin, self-custody, sovereignty and the need to reduce dependence upon fiat institutions, even while they may disagree about almost everything else.

Muslim movements have historically struggled with the question of how much ideological agreement is required before Muslims can meaningfully organize together. If agreement requires identical views on politics, fiqh, madhhab, theology, methodology, geopolitics and every other controversy Muslim Twitter manages to discover, then very little coordination is possible outside increasingly narrow camps.

Bitcoin Majlis, by contrast, has emerged around something closer to a narrow but hard consensus.

Riba is destructive. Fiat money is structurally compromised. Bitcoin offers a credible monetary alternative. Permissionless self-custody or nothing. Muslims should become less dependent upon institutions whose incentives are hostile to them. Beyond this, there is considerable room for difference.

This creates the possibility of a network that does not need to grow in the way conventional organizations grow. There does not have to be one Bitcoin Majlis headquarters coordinating every Muslim Bitcoiner on earth. A group in London can organize one way, Somalis somewhere else can organize another, Malaysians another, and if different communities eventually establish their own relays, local gatherings, educational programs, businesses or charitable institutions, there is no contradiction in that. This is actually encouraged. The network can spointer and reproduce itself without everyone joining one bureaucracy.

In that sense, the model is more distributed, even somewhat swarm-like, although we do not mean that in the sense of disorder. It means that coordination can occur through shared protocols, norms and incentives rather than through a single chain of command. Our own notes (nevent1q…zhxh) on Bitcoin Majlis have described this as a movement without the usual institutional form, held together more by praxis, common protocolized culture and a rigid anti-riba monetary orientation than by membership in a formal organization.

This brings us back to the Muslim Bitcoin Summit.

If the Summit were merely two days of people explaining why Bitcoin has a fixed supply, that would be quite boring, and there would honestly be little reason for it to exist. There are already thousands of hours of podcasts, books, videos and conferences explaining Bitcoin, and nobody needs another man standing on a stage explaining the 21 million supply cap for the nine-thousandth time.

The reason for a specifically Muslim Bitcoin Summit is that something else is happening around the monetary question.

The Summit is where a network that usually exists across cyberspace, group chats, Nostr relays, online communities, local meetups and scattered friendships becomes physically present in one place. It is where Muslims can encounter people who have already begun applying these ideas to their own lives, not merely by buying Bitcoin, but by thinking seriously about self-custody, privacy, open-source software, business, family wealth, network states, charity and community institutions, riba and the question of what Muslim sovereignty could mean in an age increasingly defined by monetary instability, mass surveillance and accelerated AI development.

Perhaps most importantly, we are not trying to sell people another institution upon which they should become dependent. If anything, the opposite should be true.

The successful attendee of the Muslim Bitcoin Summit should leave needing fewer institutions than when he arrived.

He should understand his money better. He should understand custody better. He should understand the technological systems around him better. He should have met Muslims capable of helping him learn things which previously seemed inaccessible. He should leave with the uncomfortable realization that many of the dependencies he assumed were permanent are simply habits.

And this is ultimately why we keep returning to the question: what else is there?

Islamic finance can give us another fiat financial product. Muslim tech can give us another app. Academia can produce another critique. Political movements can give us another platform. NGOs can give us another campaign. Scholars can give us another fatwa. Again, all of these have their place, and we do not pretend otherwise.

But where else are Muslims gathering around an attempt to confront riba hegemony at the monetary layer of civilization while simultaneously giving ordinary Muslims the tools to begin acting upon that conclusion themselves?

Where else do we find monetary exit joined to technical praxis, self-custody joined to open-source software, sound money joined to long-term thinking, online networks joined to physical community, and individual sovereignty deliberately understood as something which should eventually strengthen families and communities rather than merely produce isolated individuals dependent on some state?

Perhaps some other movement will eventually answer these questions better than we do. That would be a good thing. Bitcoin Majlis does not need to become the official institution of anything, and the Muslim Bitcoin Summit does not need to become another annual conference whose continued existence becomes more important than the reasons it was created.

For now, however, we are telling you that something genuinely unusual is taking shape and you need to be paying attention to this.

There is a growing network of Muslims who are not merely criticizing the riba-based monetary system but gradually attempting to leave it without working within the confines of a gold standard or political movement, who are acquiring the tools necessary to make that exit real, who are learning to organize without waiting for permission, and who are discovering that every step toward greater individual and communal sovereignty can make the next step easier.

So after understanding why Bitcoin is important for Muslims, perhaps the next question is no longer whether we need a Muslim Bitcoin Summit.

The more interesting question is simply this:

What else is there?

Come to the next Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London on October 10th and 11th. Get your tickets here: https://mslmbtcsummit.com/

We look forward to seeing you there inshaAllah.

Allahu Akbar

2026-08-22T05:10:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…5nut
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Allahu Akbar

Answering a question that many may have #naddr1qq…ldw0

2026-07-31T15:27:41Z

Answering a question that many may have
nostr:naddr1qqj8w6re94sj6mt4wdkxjmfdvf5hgcm0d9hz6um4d4kkjapdd4enjvmrdvc8wq3q3nzhjmuhxyxxtxhwc9vxucydw3u5m5ykamnmtvqjqmpw3mt7k48qxpqqqp65wkmldw0

"A time will surely come upon people in which none will ...

2026-06-29T16:29:08Z

"A time will surely come upon people in which none will remain but that he consumes Riba. If he does not consume it, he will be afflicted by its dust."
— Sunan Abī Dāwūd 3331

We are living in this time. Right now.

You can spend your whole life trying to keep your money clean, refusing the loans, the credit cards, the interest-bearing accounts, and still never escape it. The dust settles on you anyway. It is in the price of your food, the rent you pay, the wage you earn, the savings you hold. Whether you choose it or not, you are touching Riba every single day.

To see why, look at where our money actually comes from. Nearly every pound and dollar begins life as a loan. When a bank extends credit, new money is created out of nothing. But the bank only ever creates the principal, never the interest owed on top of it. That extra is simply expected to appear from somewhere.

Now think about the cycle that creates. If money is created as debt, and that debt carries interest, the system can never stand still. There is always more owed than there is money to repay it, so more has to be borrowed into existence just to service what already exists. The machine has to keep running. This is why the money supply only ever grows, in every country, decade after decade. It isn't a policy anyone could simply reverse. It is the nature of money that is born as debt.

And every time that supply grows, the money in your pocket is worth a little less. That is all inflation is: not prices mysteriously rising, but your money being quietly diluted to keep a debt-based system from seizing up. You are paying, slowly and invisibly, to hold a currency that has to be debased to survive.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as abstract economics, but it is a matter of faith. Once money is guaranteed to lose value over time, our ability to hold to our principles quietly erodes. Take Qard Hasan, the interest-free loan Islam so strongly encourages. Lend a brother £100, expecting nothing back but the £100. A year later he repays it in full, yet it now buys you less than the day you handed it over. Your generosity has cost you, in real terms. The only way to break even would be to charge a surplus on top. To charge Riba. You would refuse, of course; but that same penalty on generosity is what restricts the collective ability to lend Qard Hasan, and pushes people towards interest-bearing loans instead.

At the scale of a whole economy, with varying cultures and beliefs, you cannot rely on faith as a means of prevention. Every lender who simply wants to break even is pushed to charge interest, and they will. Not out of greed, but out of self-preservation. The system doesn't just permit Riba; it makes Riba the rational choice.

Put it together and the cycle comes into focus. Riba isn't sitting in one place, waiting for you to be disciplined enough to step around it. It is there at the source, in the way every pound is born owing interest that was never created. From there, inflation drives that same Riba downstream, amplifying it at every step, until it has seeped into every transaction and every price you pay. It is there at the top, and multiplied all the way to the bottom. That is why you can't escape it. Not for any failing of yours, but because it is built into the money itself.

None of this lets us off the hook, though. That the system is rigged against us explains the difficulty; it does not excuse us from finding a way out. For most of our lifetimes there genuinely was no feasible alternative, so "this is just how the world works" held some weight. That simply isn't true anymore.

I, along with many others, firmly believe the way out is Bitcoin. Not another Islamic finance product with an Arabic label stitched onto the same broken system, but a different foundation entirely. A money that was never born of debt, that no bank issues as a loan, that no authority can print, debase, or inflate away. Its supply is fixed, so holding it costs you nothing, and lending it freely no longer needs to come at a loss.

The fight against Riba is about more than willpower, and it is never going to be won through one careful personal decision at a time. It starts further back than that. It starts with the money itself. With opting out of a system built on Riba, and into one that isn't.

But this isn't a fight any of us wins alone. It needs Muslims willing to look the system squarely in the eye and work out, together, what comes next. That is the conversation the Muslim Bitcoin Summit exists to have, and this October it comes to the UK for the first time. If what you've read here unsettles you, that instinct is worth following. Even if you have your doubts. Even if you're not convinced. Even if your instinct is to reject the solution we're proposing. Come and ask the hard questions. This is how we start to build the way out.

https://mslmbtcsummit.com/
Oct 10-11 | London, UK

And without boycotting the money itself

2026-05-23T07:56:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…4xrr
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And without boycotting the money itself

I’m here for this, would be a great opportunity for me to learn ...

2026-05-15T19:14:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…qtey
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I’m here for this, would be a great opportunity for me to learn more in the process too