Islamic Economics: Solving Wealth Inequality by Mixing Libertarianism with... SOCIALISM??
For this episode I spoke to Ahmed Gatnash, the Executive director of Kawaakibi Foundation. He is also a Strategy Advisor at the Albert Einstein Institution, and is the co-author of Middle East Crisis Factory, a primer on systemic crises and a vision for a positive future for the MENA region.
During the discussion we spoke about the context of the political economic situation where Islam rose, the economic policies that were put into practice during this time, and how the policies looked at today could be seen as a mix of libertarian and socialist. One of the most interesting institutions of this period was the Waqf, an income producing asset that is removed from individual ownership for perpetuity so that the income is dedicated to a public good.
You can also find the interview in video form on YouTube here.
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Transcript
And also in the Quran, there are verses which say things like the objective of setting up an economy is so that wealth should not circulate only between a select few in society. It should be circulating more broadly. People should have access. And they basically
addressed some of the same problems that we're addressing today of how do you prevent political power from centralizing massively when wealth centralizes massively. There really is no meritocracy whenever, like, wealth begets wealth and that is equated to power in many different ways. And so what ends up happening, I think, is a lot of people then fall into this trap of thinking like, I'm poor because I deserve it or I'm rich because I deserve it. But this problem has happened before, like you're describing in Mecca, probably various other places has happened before. So we're kind of looking at a similar thing, but from the political perspective in that there's a set of institutions in the region, which like what's happening in the region today is not
the system being broken. It's the system working exactly as it's out to work. It is a factory which produces crises and crises roll off the conveyor belt one after the other. And they're not gonna stop until you change the way that the system works. It's hard, but the root of it is is really, really simple. And it's that we will never stand on our own two feet if foreign powers will keep intervening militarily every time something goes wrong, or if people keep supporting terrorist movements, or if these autocrats keep receiving support in order to have their boots on society's neck. It's not that complex. It's that society has to be self governing and it has the capacity and it has the will and it has not been given the opportunity.
Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Central podcast. I'm your host, Josh, and I'm here with Ahmed Kathnas, who is the executive director of Kalakibi, which is a very interesting, organization that does a lot of research, especially around the Middle East region on politics and economics. And I really wanted to have him on so he can talk about some of the research that they've been doing, specifically about Islamic economics and, you know, try to bring forth a different perspective on economics. And oftentimes, when we have conversations about these things, it can sometimes be, maybe narrowly focused on, like, a lot of, like, western thinking. So I thought I'd comment on to shed some light from the research that we've been on, kind of very different ways of thinking about economics, from that standpoint. That would be really interesting, and they've also done some interesting work around cryptocurrencies in The Middle East. Yeah. Hi, Ahmed. How are you doing? Thanks for coming on. Do you want to, like, maybe give a more extended introduction than I was able to about yourself and how it could be?
Sure. Thanks for having me. So we're a human rights organization focused on long term change in The Middle East and North Africa region. We do that through projects, exploring areas which we think have a potentially disproportionate amount of impact relative to how much attention they're receiving. We've looked at the potential of Bitcoin in enabling human rights organizations and activists in repressive countries to be able to receive funding from externally to transact trillion and pay their contributors without state surveillance leading to severe consequences. We have a program on the power of art and creative dissent, especially in how we can foster that in the region. We've been looking at novel interventions in mental health and how we can treat PTSD among activists and human rights defenders, foreign political prisoners, refugees. And we have a a disinformation monitor where we study, manipulation of the public sphere, especially by, authoritarian governments. And we try to be, an early warning system for people who we think may be targeted or for concerted disinformation campaigns that we detect and especially where they cross over into the real world and combine with corruption scandals or transnational impression.
Yeah. So it sounds like you guys have quite a lot, of different initiatives happening at the same time, and we'll definitely get into that, especially the I'm interested to hear about the crypto stuff for people, who are listening to the podcast. Maybe one of the first things I wanted to start with just because I thought it was an interesting starting point to kinda contextualize a lot of things is some of the research that you shared with me around Islamic economics. So maybe we can start with that. If you can explain a bit what is Islamic economics and maybe how it differs a bit from kind of dominant Western narratives.
So we're looking at some of the economic ideas that were prevalent in especially early Islamic history and systems which were developed to deal with a particular set of problems, which we think are extremely relevant today, mainly massive financial inequality. It's not like a radically new problem right now. It's existed repeatedly through history, and different societies have come up with different ways of addressing it. And as we well, from our awareness of our own, like, society's history and tradition, we knew that there was a set of systems which dealt with the problem of economic inequality quite well for a very long time. And it just jumped out to us that some of these solutions were incredibly relevant today. Some of them were ideas that are being discussed in the context of inequality today, but some of them are not even really in the conversation. And when you bring them all together, they actually form a really elegant system. So going back to the context of it, Mecca, which is the place where Islam was born, was a city which was basically built on long distance trade. It didn't have much agriculture or industrial production. And it sat at the kind of meeting point of multiple global empires, the Byzantines, Persia, Yemen, the Horn Of Africa, Egypt, and they were kind of the meeting point for all of these people, and goods came through as they went across the world. They engaged in large scale trade. They had caravans of, like, 5,000 camels, which were jointly owned between multiple merchants. So this was something that was happening before. Like, Venice is is reputed to be the the birth of the joint stock company, but this was happening earlier than that. So they had a legal system which was built to facilitate that. And they had a society which was kind of meant to be a meritocracy. They valued people kind of making it on their smarts and rising up. And they had those stories of people pulling themselves up from nothing to be fabulously wealthy. But it was a pretty brutal and unforgiving place where there was massive inequality. The rich tended to get richer. The poor tended to get poorer. There was slavery. Many people lived in, you know, abject poverty and were unable to access the markets. The rest of Arabia was pretty poor and was kind of based on tribal feudalism and subsistence, migratory tribes with their animals, etcetera. And that kind of shaped the not just the economic, but the political landscape because the inequality of resources led to inequality of legal outcome. So the way you'd be punished for certain crimes would vary depending on the stature of your tribe or the personal power that you commanded based on your wealth. And it ultimately led to, like, a a very brutal environment where if you did well, you'd do fabulously well, but if you didn't, you'd be crushed. And that was the context in which Islam was created. And the idea of equality is something that appears in a lot of the Hadith's narrations of the prophet's life and the things that he did. And also in the Quran, there are verses which say things like the objective of setting up an economy is so that wealth should not circulate only between a select few and society. It should be circulating more broadly. People should have access. And they basically addressed some of the same problems that we're addressing today of how do you prevent political power from centralizing massively when wealth centralizes massively. And I think those two, even then, were seen as inseparable. So you had to prevent wealth from centralizing massively. How do you do that without undermining the basis of a meritocracy while preserving people's agency and ability to act and ability to build something of their own?
I think it's the way you describe it is very interesting as a, like this is absolutely true of the current economic situation. You have people who are more ideological on the, maybe, liberal side or on the pro market side who say that the markets are a place of meritocracy in themselves. We already live in a meritocracy. And if you are you just gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But this is something that there really is no meritocracy whenever, like, wealth begets wealth, and that, is equated to power in many different ways. And so what ends up happening, I think, is a lot of people then fall into this trap of thinking, like, I'm poor because I don't because I deserve it, or I'm rich because I deserve it. But this problem has happened before, like you're describing in Mecca, probably various other places has happened before. And, yeah, I guess there were there were various ways of being able to deal with that issue that may have maybe in this context, it it it it, you know, Islam perhaps provided a solution for a political economic problem that was happening in the region that was part of maybe the appeal of its spread and the appeal of gaining followers in in that historical context is what I imagine.
Yeah. And there really was that moral aspect. A lot of the prophets' early teaching was, like, striking to hear the emphasis that you are not a better person just because you're wealthier and you're not a less valuable individual because you're poor. And, ultimately, one day, we'll all stand naked and possessionless before our creator and be judged based on our moral character and what we did in our lives, not based on our wealth, and you can't take that with you. It was such a central part of the moral framework of Islam.
So do you have any, yeah, any, like, examples of what were some of the the structures that they put in place to deal with this problem? Because right now, I feel like we're in this situation, especially in mainstream discourse around inequality is, like, the only there's only, like, one or two solutions, and it's like, either we do that or we don't because one side will say, well, taxation is, like, the the way that we reduce inequality, which, you know, I agree to some extent, definitely. And then the other side will say, like, no. No. If we tax, then it will just mean that we're ruining business and and whatever else. And that's kind of the extent of the discourse oftentimes. Not always. But Yeah.
You mentioned that part of the problem is that wealth begets wealth, and I think that understanding was also definitely embedded in this. One of the central ideas that most people are aware of is that interest was forbidden. And you had zakah, which was a tax upon wealth of two and a half percent per year, which went directly to poor and marginalized groups. So effectively, you had a negative interest rate. What that did was ensure that wealth does not automatically accumulate over time and compound, but instead the opposite. Unless you are actively taking risk in order to increase your wealth, like risk is proportional to reward, basically, and you don't get rewarded just by hoarding resources, which is what what we have today. Like, if you're a billionaire today, you have to mess up on a spectacular level to stop being a billionaire because your money can just accumulate without you doing anything. Zakkah, the wealth tax, and the prohibition on interest are probably the best known things. There are some things about the structure of government. So there was a kind of deep not quite the same as contemporary libertarianism, but there was a suspicion of government power based on, kind of a recognition of the moral realities that power tends to corrupt. Many of early the the the early caliphs who, the prophet's close companions who succeeded him, have a lot of recorded sayings where they basically, express deep concern over what they might do with this power that they have and how that would affect, the afterlife and how they would be judged. And in several contexts actually refused additional power or refused to make decisions that they felt were, like, above their pay grade even as the the primary leader. So things like the wealth tax didn't go towards central bureaucracy initially. They did later, but they were initially kind of directly distributed to the poor, a form of, like, not a universal basic income, but a a qualified basic income. And there weren't things like sales taxes, income taxes, or customs. Even though some of these were known at the time, they weren't foreign ideas. There was this idea that that was that that to to to levy discretionary taxes would be overreached by a ruler. And I think some of the modern experience has basically shown that when governments have that power, it allows them to tip the to put their finger on the scale and tip it to favor certain industries or certain actors, which basically enables the political power to favor the accumulation of economic power. There was an emphasis on hard money, which couldn't be inflated. It was gold based currency. And the idea was, again, similar to modern libertarian thought that if you allow the government to inflate money, it will, and that will be done for the benefit of those in power and lead to wealth accumulation. There were also a set of rules limiting economic extraction and rent seeking. So, again, wealth can't be get wealth. You can't squat on resources. In early Islamic history, land couldn't be owned. It could only be contracted for use for a period of time. And there was a land use tax similar to Georgism. So, basically, you can't have access to this land, which makes your descendants fabulously wealthy in the future. You're always paying a tax which is based on your use. And one of my favorite institutions is, the, which is the precursor to the philanthropic foundation, that basically transferred to English common law and led to the creation of the concept of the foundation in the modern world. But it was basically the idea that you could take an income producing asset and remove it permanently from individual ownership and make it self owning in perpetuity with mission lock so that income would be dedicated towards, a public good, like, supporting a a religious institution like a mosque or a school or a guest house or a hospital, as determined by the donor. And then as soon as that's instituted, the donor no longer has a say and no longer has any ownership or control. And this accumulated over five hundred years to the point where, some of the history books document that most of the countryside surrounding Damascus was public goods, and it expanded every generation because everybody who succeeded had this really strong moral incentive to do that. And there was an entire cradle to grave social welfare system which ran based on this, but outside of government control. The third sector would provide things from social care for the disabled to creating wells for migrating birds so that they could drink, to replacing the cutlery of households that didn't have, to funding wedding parties, to those without means, to providing health care, to providing education, looking after orphans, all of these things. And if modern wealth inequality is like a vicious cycle, wealth begets more wealth and the resources flow up towards the most wealthy. This kind of created the opposite cycle where the wealth sector constantly grew and grew and every generation was incentivized to expand it. This basically continued until a few hundred years ago when it broke violently with the onset of modern colonialism. The Waqf, sector was basically completely dismantled and moved into private ownership or state ownership in most of the Muslim world.
No. That's super interesting. I was I was gonna ask you about the Waqif because that was one of the most interesting institutions that I I noted when I was reading through the research. Like, there yeah. There there's so much to that. But it it it feels like, it feels when you explain it, it feels so obvious. Why don't we do that? Or, like, why why why couldn't we simply just reverse the relationship? Or, like but I think it's part part of the maybe I don't know if this is too strong of a word, but, like, indoctrination of being, like, living within neoliberal society is kind of, like, this disbelief that anything can be owned outside of, like, private property or do or, like, kind of individual property ownership or, like, maybe state ownership, although that maybe that is is is falling away for a lot of people.
Yeah. One of the questions that I've been pondering is whether it's possible to separate this from the moral imperative that came with it. Because the reason that the waqf grew continuously was because people had this idea that was socially accepted and dominant, that this is what you're going to be judged upon in the afterlife. This is the purpose of your life, and you are a bad person if you accumulate and hold wealth and don't do something for future generations. And I'm not sure if that that's an open question to me, whether we can build such an institution without the moral imperative that comes with it. Right. Yeah. I have kind of, like,
a a half thought that feudalism I mean, just, like, religion as being, like, a core institution of kind of, like, a lot of feudal society. Like, the need for a kind of, like, moral code was, like, how, you know, certain laws or expectations of behavior basically scaled in this world and time. And with maybe the scientific revolution or being so closely linked to then the creation of the steam engine and all these industrial discoveries and and whatever else that then, like, down the line produced capitalism and capital being then, I would say, like, breaking free of its feudal kind of restrictions. Like, the Waka sounds like something like that. There's something there for me that that it makes me so there's then this, like, I don't wanna fall into the trap of, like, kind of I don't know. Just a lot of conservatives today, I don't know, like, take your right wing billionaire talking about, like, oh, religion is gone, and now we have like, there's a hole to be filled and, like, kind of back to tradition type of movement type of thing that I find very a little bit alarming. But I think in part because there's a lot of these, like, contradictory, like, needs of different actors within capitalism. Like, billionaires need people to have more babies, to have more labor so that they can continue employing people and therefore and the employment pool being large enough so that they don't have to increase wages. Capitalism being just like Yeah. And they need ideally some level of social stability as well. As well. And, like, a drop in in population could be something that really, like, messes with that. But, anyways, I'm kind of going, yeah, a bit of a rant. But, no. Yeah. The when I think of the WACCOWF, the way that you described it also sounded to me I mean, just to bring the the crypto element is, like, kind of one of the ideas that I had in my mind of what we then could do with crypto at the time because, like, then we can create, like, more autonomous, like, productive types of infrastructures that then, like, goes off and, like, you know, funds other things, which is, like, kind of the idea behind, you know, my project with Breadchain. But it's also interesting to note that this is already a thing before.
Doesn't require a blockchain. It doesn't Yeah. The the modern crypto equivalent is basically you create some kind of governance system and then you renounce the smart contract. So you you're not Exactly. Yeah. Then as long as that thing can still
bear yield or some sort of productive capacity, then you can fund something into perpetuity or as long as it lasts. And that, to me, was, like, a very interesting concept. I think the the the reason why it kind of revealed itself to me through the lens of crypto is because you never see it in anywhere that I've lived. No kind of institution is like the walk besides maybe a Methodist hospital or something like that. Yeah. There are some people who are experimenting with different models of philanthropy today. I think
two of the most prominent recent examples are Jeff Bezos's ex wife, Mackenzie, and Melinda Gates, Melinda French Gates, who are trying not just to direct their philanthropy towards minorities and underrepresented groups and especially women, but also the idea of how you include people in a decision making process rather than it just being something that comes on high. Mhmm.
Yeah. It's interesting that it took the women in those relationships to be divorced and then to, be able to experiment with this more or something perhaps there. Well, that's a disruption of the power center. I understand. Yeah. There is power in in divorce. One of the things that I really like exploring about a lot of these types of institutions and the history behind them is it gives a little bit of hope that humans have done it before. This is not a new thing. And then beginning to think about what is the maybe abstraction how do we take the the core parts of those institutions that we like, the abstraction of that from necessarily the particular context in which it was in, how then I think it becomes a much more interesting conversation of, like, how do we implement this in a way that fits the modern context? Because what it did was good, like, in many ways, but maybe, you know, this wouldn't work in a non Islamic whatever, like, group of people. But can there be a kind of, like, moral I don't know if you want to frame it as moral or ethical type of framework to think about this?
Whether we can create some kind of, yeah, social standard where we stop celebrating people for, you know, relentless extraction of wealth and celebrate them for supporting public goods instead because we have created a culture which glorifies wealth extraction in whatever way possible. Yeah. But, yeah, it basically comes down to incentive design.
Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. And I think one thing that I wanted to maybe note as well is that I mean, it's interesting that because you you talked about there were some elements of kind of, like, libertarian like, what is today, like, associated with libertarian thoughts around, like, hard money or whatever, small small government, if you wanna say that? Like, if you look at the institutions as a whole, like, all of them together, it doesn't really fit the the the conservative libertarian, like, desire. They want. Yeah. It has this way of avoiding the left right binary because there are some institutions which you see in your, like, this is a very left wing idea. And there are some which are, today, very right coded. And you're kind of mashing them together. Yeah. So, I mean, just to because I this has just popped up in my head, but, like, I was I remember I was scrolling Reddit on the libertarian subreddits. I like to peruse there. I hate Reddit. But, you know, there's a guy you know, his his comment was something along the lines of, like, you know, being angry that he has to pay property taxes and saying, like, the government, like, doesn't allow us to own anything. We we don't own anything actually, you know, living under a government. But I've which I find in I think there's this this contradiction within the libertarian movement of, like, also liking a lot of Georgist ideas around land, but then also, like
Yeah. And maybe there are, like I haven't looked into this, but I think there would probably be multiple currents within libertarianism. Like, I'd identify, like, the one that I know is most destructive is, like, Randian thought because Of course. Ayn Rand basically glorified, like, selfishness, and, like, she was fine with dog eat dog. She wasn't a, like, a a moral kind of philosopher.
Yeah. No. Definitely the worst one, probably. Another thing that maybe
I guess And I also wonder how much those attitudes are a product of government losing trust in a rightful sense in the modern age where where kind of disillusioned by government has done quite a poor job. It is captured by special interests. I wonder how much of those objections would go away if people actually believed that government was working towards their interest rather than kind of being captured by special interests and and being part of that extractive apparatus. Yeah. For sure. I mean, you definitely they're definitely,
like like, I I would say maybe in part, you know, Randianism or objectivism, this form of libertarianism, is very probably more prominent in people from places that maybe have this high distrust of government to some degree. Like, I've I don't I yeah. It's it's rare to find someone who comes from a place where maybe they trust the government very highly because they think they're doing a good job and to also be into Ayn Rand. You know? Definitely a correlation. One of the things that oh, you want to mention something? I know. I just wanted to kind of quickly note that there is, I believe, a difference between what is often referred to as Islamic finance versus your research on Islamic economics, just to touch on that so people don't get confused.
Oh, yeah. So my personal opinion is that Islamic finance is kind of using Islamic ideas to provide a rhetorical justification for modern capitalism. And most of what exists in Islamic finance today is not actually substantively different from capitalist finance. It's it's just with a a bit of a an Islamic sprinkle on top to make it palatable to the Muslim world. And what we're trying to do is to kind of figure out a system which is fundamentally different in the outcomes it achieves rather than just being culturally palatable.
Yeah. Can I one of the at least the way that I have it in my head, and, you know, correct me if you see it differently, is that a lot of kind of current institutions that we see perhaps in the Islamic world, but also in, like, any place that sort of has had some sort of history of being colonized in some way or being, like, subjected to imperial power has these kind of, like that the people in power were and are influenced by the imperial powers or, like, the colonizers or however you want to frame it? And oftentimes, if you're sort of the elite of that society, you're put into this weird position of needing to represent your people against the oppressors, but also enjoying the the benefits of the inequality that is produced by now being in the elite, I guess.
A lot of the authoritarian governments of the Muslim world don't even try too hard to pretend that what's going on is Islamic. It's just the way things are. And there's a really fantastic book called Heaven's Bankers by Haris Erfan. He was a high up finance professional. I think he was involved in setting up, Deutsche Bank's Islamic finance arm and HSBCs as well. And he eventually quit the industry on moral grounds and and wrote this book about it, and he explains how the institution would basically come and say, we have this new derivative product, and we want to be selling it towards the Muslim world, like to these sheikhs in The Gulf and the billionaire rulers. Only they want to do this Islamic finance thing, so we need you to rewrite this thing to make it Islamic finance acceptable. We still want it to do exactly the same thing, just change the language, etcetera. And they would basically restructure the contract. If there's one transaction which is prohibited, you would basically make three transactions, which are all independently allowed. But if you add them together, they equal the same thing. Basically, clever ways to get around pro prohibitions and ultimately end up with the same product product. So a lot of these ideas were actually coming from within the same institutions. It's not even that they were from the Muslim world or distortions of originally sound ideas. Right. It's like the same products, but making it palatable for
a different audience.
Yeah. Just, like, change the way the contract is structured. It
it it slightly reminds me of, like, the Amish or Mennonites in The US. Also, I think certain orthodox Jews have a similar thing of, like, not using particular types of technology on certain days, and therefore, they have kind of like these Rube Goldberg kind of machines that they, you know Yeah. Exactly. Press they didn't actually press the the button that's connected to the light bulb, but they pressed some other button with their foot because that's okay from God.
Yeah. And, like, we have a tradition of that, within Islam as well that, like, to try and like, there's the the letter and the letter and the spirit of the law, and it's condemned to try to go against the spirit of the law whilst still, like, following the letter, which is what you'd basically be doing. Like, there's a an example given in the Quran of a a Jewish tribe who were told not to fish on the Sabbath, and therefore, they laid out their nets just before the Sabbath and collected them directly after the Sabbath, which is effectively the same thing. You're just, like, exploiting a a technicality.
That's fair. Thank you for elucidating the difference between exotic finance and Islamic economics. They're two separate things. What I want to kind of touch upon next, the book that you and the cofounder of Kawakibi, Eyad al Baghdadi, who's a Palestinian activist, called the Middle East Crisis Factory. I was wondering if we can get a bit into that and if you can explain what exactly is the Middle East Crisis Factory.
Yeah. So we're kind of looking at a similar thing but from the political perspective in that there's a set of institutions in the region, which, like, what's happening in the region today is not the system being broken. It's the system working exactly as it's set up to work. It is a factory which produces crises, and crises roll off the conveyor belt one after the other. And they're not gonna stop until you change the way that the system works. The first half of the book is a primer on the region's history. We go back about a hundred and fifty years, and we explore the way these institutions were set up in the colonial era, the way the governance systems were disrupted, and then new governance systems were created in the model of the colonial powers or authoritarian states, and how they interacted with the social change of the era after the decolonial struggles. These led to the dictatorships, which continue going today. And we look at the idea of the vicious triangle, which is that there are three forces, terrorists, tyrants, and foreign intervention. While many assume that these are in some way opposed, we're actually framing them as a symbiotic system. So, whereas you would, for example, have foreign intervention to dislodge a terrorist movement, what we're saying is that this foreign intervention is actually reinforcing the logic by which the terrorist movement justifies itself and causing the cycle to go round and round. And the same with terrorist movements and native authoritarian leaders or dictators and foreign intervention. Like, every relationship in this triangle is basically self reinforcing. And the only way to disrupt that is by empowering native institutions and enabling society to resolve its own problems by itself without falling for the hollow promises of these three actors, whether it's foreign intervention saying it's coming in to fix things, whether it's terrorists who say that the tactics that they resort to are necessary in order to liberate society, or whether it's tyrants saying our strong leader is needed in order to protect you from these two threats. All of them are lies and all of them are self reinforcing, and only a native agency can guess out of this. So this that the first half of the book is telling the history, and the second half is more of a road map of the ideas that can help us get out of this foreign policy and activism.
Yeah. I think that's a good kind of these three actors are kind of like the spectrum of often what are like the discourse. I mean, it's so rare, especially in, I would say, like, in American or Western discourse around this is, like, either, like, the terrorists are in there. It's bad. Like, there's a dictator, or, like, we gotta go in and bring them freedom.
No. This is such a complex region, and it's so hard to understand. And we're never going to resolve, like, Middle East pieces like rocket science is the the kind of cliche of, like, a really impossibly hard thing. And what we wanted to do was create this, primer to explain that, actually, it's not that complex. It's hard, but the root of it is is really, really simple. And it's that we will never stand on our own two feet if foreign powers will keep intervening militarily every time something goes wrong or if people keep supporting terrorist movements or if these autocrats keep receiving support in order to have their boots on society's neck. It's not that complex. It's that society has to be self governing, and it has the capacity, and it has the will, and it has not been given the opportunity. And the set of ideas in order to give it that opportunity are not really that complex or that hard either. You just have to think beyond immediate self interest and realize that, yeah, it might be easier to have a military intervention this year. But on, like, a five, ten year time scale, that's just going to lead to an even bigger catastrophe. And we have for each of those sides of the triangle, we have a couple of case studies, like the US war in Iraq, for example. And that's Iraq is like an example of the full cycle going around repeatedly because after colonialism, you had the rise of local authoritarianism as a backlash to colonialism. Then you had foreign intervention in order to try and like, in the name of removing authoritarianism. Then you had terrorism as a backlash to foreign intervention, and then you have the empowerment of local authoritarianism to fight the terrorists. And then you have to have more foreign intervention in order to fight those terrorists, and it just goes around and around and around in circles forever until you realize that, hang on. We have to actually think on, like, at least even a medium time scale. Just stop being so short termist and thinking only in terms of today and this month and think about the structures that you're creating and how they affect society on the scale of a few years. Like, the the generation that's growing up right now, how will this affect them as they mature into their adulthood? How will it affect their adulthood? How will the trauma affect the way they interact in these institutions that they build? How will the economic structures of society either empower a decentralization of power and democratic governance, or how will they contribute towards the centralization of power and the normalization of violence?
Yeah. Yeah. No. That is that is something that I think I find, like, very misunderstood or, like, under underanalyzed. It's kind of like a bunch of people who are being traumatized by the foreign intervention, by the war, like, it's I can imagine just, like, a huge effect on people and how they interact with one another, how they, you know, relate to each other, how, like, their ability to or to not, like, be able to work together due to those, like, traumas that are caused by in in in my view, kind of, obviously, like, the roots would be, like, original colonization or imperial
power. You know? Exactly. And there's there's a pretty pretty direct line of causality. The founders of of Al Qaeda were all former prisoners in the horrific torture jails of Egypt and and Jordan. ISIS entire leadership pretty much came out of a couple of US run prisons in Iraq where we know the kinds of abuses that were occurring. Yeah. And there are commentators who are pointing out today the fact that the reason any of the popularity of Hamas exists is because they're perceived as the only solution after you've shut the door of any type of peaceful change in the face of Palestinians. Like, if they organize boycotts and divestments, then they're called terrorists. If they do campus activism, terrorism. Like, if they try to, lobby the United Nations to recognize their statehood, it's terrorism. Like, eventually, there's nothing left except actual violence. Yeah. No. Absolutely.
It's, like, one of the things that I think really bothers me oftentimes when and this is probably maybe only tangentially related, but, like, you know, in Europe, for example, the EU being the lapdog of The United States oftentimes. And then you have kind of right wing conservative Europeans, like, putting their hands up in the air about all these migrants coming in into our into our continent and whatever else. But, like, your parties are supporting all the interventions of The United States and its allies that is displacing the people who probably, many of them, don't want to leave but feel like they have to.
And sometimes it's not entirely about intervention, but it's about a lack of principles. I'm not a dogmatic anti interventionist. I recognize that the world is complex and that you can't ignore a fire in your neighbor's apartment and expect that not to come around. What happened in Syria was, a brutal dictator started massacring his population and eventually began using tools which are prohibited by all international laws and norms and standards, chemical weapons on his own people. Obama kind of drew a red line and said using chemical weapon is gonna be a red line. And then that red line was crossed, and he decided, you know what? Fuck it. Let's do nothing. And then massive numbers of refugees began leaving the country, logically so, because what else are you gonna do when your president is using chemical weapons against you? Hundreds of thousands of people had to flee across the the seat to I to Europe. Radical movements took power in the power vacuum, like ISIS. You had extremism and refugee flows, which emboldened the right wing in Europe, which led to, you know, the election of populists like Donald Trump. And all of that could have been avoided by simply being principled when Obama said there are certain things that we should not accept in a civilized world. One of them is using chemical weapons against civilians. So what we're saying is is not that there should be no kind of intervention whatsoever, but there should be, like, basic standards, and there should be consistency.
Yep. No. I can understand that that point of view. I think yeah. We've created a situation. It feels sort of like oftentimes there's not a yeah. There's never just like a there's never an easy answer, I guess.
Yeah. And you have to think through to, like, second and third order effects. Like, when you do something or allow something to happen, you have to think what precedent does this, support? What does this normalize? Mhmm. And, ultimately, like, if some of the ideas that we suggest are also failures, Like, what kind of world do we actually want to live in? One where we've spent a few decades promoting native reformers who want to fix their own societies, supporting civil society and protecting it, And all of that ultimately turns out to have not succeeded. Or a world in which we spent decades using military means to fight terrorists with massive collateral damage and destruction of society and traumatization. And that turns out to have been unsuccessful. One of those at least created some kind of, positive ideas and and hope for change in the world, and the other one ultimately creates a dot. Yeah. Sure.
So maybe more in this thought space, I thought it'd be interesting to touch upon your work on the prevalence of cryptocurrency or how cryptocurrency is used in the Middle Eastern context. Like, what is its appeal and what is I believe you guys have something called the MENA Bitcoin hub. Wanna talk about that as well?
Yeah. So we have, as we've been talking about, one of the most repressive regions in the world. We have a whole host of economies failing for different reasons. Whether you look at Libya, where there is no real real functioning connection to the global economy, most people don't even have bank accounts with cards that can be used to spend online. Whether you look at Lebanon, where corruption has basically led to a complete collapse of the state and the currency being massively devalued, Egypt and Turkey, well, as hyperinflation, Sudan, where similar plus the effects of decades of sanctions, Iraq where the economy is controlled and plundered by paramilitary forces, Saudi Arabia where everything straight up belongs to the royal family. These economies like, these economic models have completely failed. We need to explore something different. But on a more immediate term, there are people who are working actively for the reform of these societies, whether it's journalists who are investigating corruption, whether it's educationalists, whether it's human rights organizations. In most places, their work is either heavily suppressed or outright criminalized. Several countries like Egypt and Tunisia have laws against receiving foreign funding. If you'd somehow manage to get around that and receive money to your bank account, guess what? The state is watching you, and they have, full insight into everything that goes on. They can see who's donating to you locally. They can see who you're paying. Those people will then kind of go under surveillance themselves. If you upset the wrong person or your work is kind of too positive, you'll end up in jail, potentially being tortured, potentially with a sentence that keeps getting extended indefinitely. You may even end up being slaughtered in a Saudi embassy and chopped to pieces. So these are a lot of problems, but we thought that one of the ways we can move towards fixing this is by enabling organizations and activists to receive money across borders and within their borders anonymously, privately, and to be able to pay the contributors securely without fear of state surveillance. And we basically built the meme and Bitcoin Hub in order to begin training activists and NGOs to to do this with Bitcoin. We're really interested in Bitcoin because of some of the central ideas like the pseudonymity and also the fact that it's hard currency. It's not controlled. Its issuance is not controlled by a small group of people. The rules won't change on us overnight, which is, you know, a nice change from our existing economies. That said, we're not blind to the issues with Bitcoin. There are issues with its development. There are issues with the the anonymity technology, but, you know, we're trying to do the best we can to enable civil society to be able to persist in the face of all the challenges that it faces.
Yeah. For sure. I can imagine that. I mean, Bitcoin is appealing due to, in this context, some of the things that you said. And, also, I mean, it depends on what you want to use it for. If it's sort of like, if transactions are kinda like the main thing that you want to do and that's that's what you need, you don't need all the other bells and whistles that maybe, like, other cryptocurrencies may like, may offer, that's not necessary. And if there's already this, like, already existing infrastructure of people being able to, whatever, download an app on their phone or, like, have a thing on their computer. Then if there are throughout The Middle East, there's a lot of places where you can have, like, kind of peer to peer marketplaces where you can, in cash, buy cryptocurrencies or not. And if they are mainly offering Bitcoin, then that makes a whole lot easier. A lot of them, you know, may not offer, you know, some insert cryptocurrency here that is more efficient at this and that. But if it's not available to people in that region, then it's difficult to to put out. Yeah.
I am personally very interested in in some of the innovations that are coming out, whether that's some of the new privacy preserving technologies on ETH, Monero for its more effective privacy technology or ideas like using DAOs as a a new backbone for nonprofit registration structures and whether that can contribute towards movement democratization as well. But these are kind of all in the research space, and we're only in implementation at the moment with Bitcoin and transactions. Right.
Do you have any is the kind of, like, main use case for you guys with that, basically, being able to move money around either, like, from, you know, from the West into The Middle East? Is it, like, within The Middle East, all the above?
It's primarily for existing organizations to be able to receive grants into the region from outside the region. So like I mentioned, in some countries, that's just outright illegal. I even heard from a funder that the only way they managed to get a grant to one grantee inside the region was to fly in with a suitcase of cash, which in the twenty first century is completely insane, but that's the world that we live in. So we're trying to facilitate that. We're trying to make it so that of all the problems these activists and organizations face, at least being able to receive money is no longer one of them. We're not that far along the adoption curve yet, but we're exploring whether activists are interested in receiving payment in Bitcoin, whether it doesn't provide too much of a mental barrier to them to be able to kind of use a peer to peer marketplace to cash it out. And we're also looking into how NGOs keep their, assets safe. If you have a six month budget and you're somewhere like Lebanon where there's always a chance that your currency could crash even further and you suddenly lose 90% of your wealth overnight. Mhmm. Maybe it's actually even with how volatile it is, Bitcoin is still a massive upgrade on that. Or maybe you wanna use a stablecoin instead. You're still on chain and off the corrupt.
How have you guys seen the availability of peer to peer markets as being quite essential to a lot of this.
Yeah. They're also, kind of in an early stage of that. Surprisingly widespread, like, authorities occasionally tried to clamp down. They banned them in Egypt for a while, and a lot of them went on the ground. They actually prosecuted a good friend of mine in Lebanon for running a peer to peer marketplace. True. So, yes, also not something we can take as a given. Right. So there's also these kinds of on and off boarding
between the two is can be a dangerous space to play in in many places. Mhmm. Yeah. No. I I, what I found was very interesting, at least in in Istanbul when I was there, was the there are quite a few peer to peer marketplaces in the Grand Bazaar, for example. And I, like, had the experience there of buying in cash, you know, some cryptocurrency and then putting it into creating a new wallets to to try it out. I wanted to have, like, that, you know, fit in person physical experience of what that is like to kind of help me think about, you know, what is this like for people who maybe do it have to do it a lot more. You know? What were the fees like? Well, that one, I was kind of like so I think I bought in euros, like, with euros, I believe. And then they so I I probably got a bad deal, to be honest. But it ended up working out in the end because I bought low and the price went higher. But, yeah, they gave so I bought, like, maybe, like, €600 or something like this. And they told me to buy ETH, and they're like, okay. We'll give you $600 of ETH. So I don't I don't remember what exactly was the difference between euros and dollars. Usually, it's around, like, 10 ish percent. So that's maybe a bit high. Yeah. That seems to be, like, a fairly standard or kind of commission. And I'm hoping that as as these markets, proliferate, that that will get computed down and people get a better deal. Yeah. So, I mean, there were some places in the Grand Bazaar where you couldn't they they had a minimum of, like so I think the the higher end places, they'd be like, no. No. No. 10 k is the minimum that we'll do. And so Right. There are some of them that are quite open that, like, this you know, our clientele are people who are not wanting to pay taxes. But also Yeah. You know, plenty of them were servicing, I think, just Turkish people there who wanted to protect their their savings from the lira dropping in value. Because in the time that I was there for two or three weeks, I mean, there's a lot of inflation when you could see it. You know? You look at it one day, and then the next day, you're like, oh, wow. It's it's a bigger it's a bigger gap. Yeah. So it was interesting to see and experience and, you know, I feel for a few of the people who are there who have to deal with that every day. Yeah. It's a terrible situation to live through.
And it it really makes me wonder about why a lot of emerging economies have really high cryptocurrency adoption rates, Nigeria, Turkey, etcetera. But I wonder why stablecoins haven't really come into that mainstream use case of people just opting out of their failing currency entirely and trying to function with stablecoins as much as possible. Yeah. I can imagine just kinda, like, technical
ability or just knowledge about how it works and, you know, I feel like I remember being a child, you know, like, debit cards and credit cards being much less, prevalent than they are today and, like, cash just being, like, used a whole lot more in in this move. And that was something that took, like, a long period of of transition more or less by the push and work of the banks, basically, and credit card companies to get people to adopt them and move away from cash. And I think the the issue with then the crypto industry is that it's decentralized, so there's not, like, necessarily a big entity per se that is, like, really pushing everybody to start using cryptocurrency. And there's, of course, other types of dangers and, like,
issues with having that type of model to do it. Yeah. There's also so much noise. Like, there's however many like, 50 different layer ones you could choose from and and, like, a a couple dozen different stablecoins and can be very confusing if you don't know exactly what you're
looking. Yeah. Not for sure. But it's also one one of the things that also slightly, like that worries me about stablecoins, I guess, is the proliferation of just, like, specifically the US dollar in so many places and whether or not because the argument for a lot of, actually, like, kind of conservatives and liberals in The US, at least the of, you know, pushing for cryptocurrency is that, no. It's good because The U US dollar hegemony will increase with the proliferation of of stable points, which is, like, a good thing about I I wonder why that's in in what way that works towards US interest. Yeah. I sometimes wonder, why don't we just choose, like, I don't know, some some neutral countries more neutral countries with, like, a stable
currency, like, I don't know, the Singaporean dollar or something like that. Not gonna massively inflate their currency as soon as they realize that they have
Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah. I I was also curious, what do you think maybe to kind of start wrapping it up? Is there anything specifically you think Islamic economics can bring to the the crypto world? Like, how can we I think it's an it's an interesting kind of, like, you know, some the because oftentimes, especially with me, you know, the conversation around economics, especially with crypto people is, like, hyper libertarianism and then, you know, I'm the communist or whatever in, like, every, conversation. Or I'm like, you know, maybe we need to think about the the proliferation of markets for everything. But then I think I feel like Islamic economics is kind of like the side route of of, like, actually, you know, let's there are other frameworks to think about this.
Yeah. I do wonder where the cryptocurrency industry is going at the moment, and what like, there are few people who seem to have a clear objective or direction that they're going in beyond capturing and extracting value. Venture capitalists looking to build another layer one or whatever, just dump it on people's heads as soon as it goes up. But I think it gives an incredible kind of testing ground for incentive design and and and go on and structures. And I would love to see those continue and for more experiments to happen with either collective action or supporting public goods, maybe like experiments with WAF in the crypto space and creating protocols or systems that support some kind of public good directly. There's a lot of really cool stuff that isn't as well known as it should be, but I think there's so much space to experiment, and that would be a much more valuable way to direct energy. And I think it also gives the opportunity for a lot more natural experiments. Like, when you have a nation state, you can only really test one way of setting up your economy at a time, And you can't constantly pivot or, you know, people probably get sick of that, but we have the opportunity to opt into and and back out of different economic experiments all the time. And I'd love to see more people kind of explicitly setting up experiments to see what kind of outcomes they produce. Like it's an experiment, like as an experimental phase, like crypto has, it's like a decade old now, but that's a remarkably short amount of time in the grand arc of our evolution as a species. And there's so much more experimentation that we could do. So we're kind of trying to also set up a center for research on these things, something where our mandate is not to, like, build a blockchain like most private companies, but to contribute towards understanding of protocol design and economic systems and how they can be applied.
So one experimentation I would love to see just based off of our conversation is, like, you know, a crypto walk of, you know, how do we because there's been so much I I mean, thanks in in part to, like, Vitalik, like, bringing this to the forefront of, like, kinda, like, crypto discourse is the the, you know, discussions around public goods and that realization that, in fact, the crypto space is quite dependent on a lot of public goods, you know, whether you frame that as, like, open source code or just the the network itself being something that is kind of, like, in some ways, a kind of collective endeavor to keep up the network to keep going. So I think the the the idea of the walk of is is very interesting as something to kind of is like a goal or perhaps the purpose of autonomous infrastructure of relieving us of some of the the labor that might require in the administration and also to give it a more autonomy and longevity to then take advantage of the however many generations of a a public a yield bearing public goods directed type of institution.
Yeah. I'd I'd love people to think this particular piece of work or this public good is so important that I'd like to contribute to setting up an endowment that supports it in in perpetuity and ensures that it keeps going for future generations rather than you know, there's a lot to say for charity in the moment, but I think we've also become accustomed to the immediacy and,
supporting in the in the very long term. But maybe just to wrap it up, I mean, first, just to say thank you for taking your time and coming on and sharing your knowledge with us. Is there a place that maybe people can keep up with you and your work with Kawakibi?
So work is on kawakibi.org. We have a newsletter. We and myself are still on Twitter at the moment. Not sure how long that'll last. For now, that's probably the best place.
Cool. Well, thanks a lot. And, yeah, definitely recommend people to check out the Coworkibi website. I'll have it in the show notes and as well check out the book, Middle East Crisis Factory. Alright. Thanks. Thanks, Josh.
