In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful
May Allah bless His Messenger Muhammad, and his family and companions and grant them Peace.

Allah, exalted is He, says that which means: "O you who believe, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority (ulu'l-amr) among you." The people of knowledge say two things about this third group, ulu'l-amr: they are the people of knowledge and they are the leaders. Note that amr can be a command or an affair/business/matter.

As to "fuqaha with ijazahs", the sorry truth is that few of them understand mu'amalat and even fewer understand the modern world, banking, finance and economics, and serious numbers of them have misled the Muslims with silly fatwas on both issues. So the simple possession of an ijazah is no guarantee of anything except permission to transmit a text and there is considerable evidence that even this is extremely limited in scope given the debasement of the system by people handing out ijazahs in a very undiscriminating fashion.

Similarly, noble institutions such as al-Azhar have been a parody of their former glory for more than a century, and have become all too frequently a source of fitnah and misguidance.

As to leaders, the above command in the ayah is to everyone, including amirs. If one becomes an amir, that does not absolve one of the command to obey. Therefore, an amir of a community ought to be in obedience to someone whose authority he acknowledges or else he will mislead his people and make them into a 'group' or a 'national group'. If he cannot find such a one, he ought to set out to find one, for his own sake and for the sake of the people he leads. If he cannot find one, he ought to talk with all the other leaders in a similar situation and they should choose one from among themselves. There is no one who is exempt from obedience. In this case, it is obviously a catastrophe for the Muslims if everyone is issuing local coins that can only be exchanged through elaborate weighings and calculations based on the different purities of metal and alloy.

As to technical specifications, most matters of the Muslims in the West today run aground on technical issues: for example, moon-sighting in Ramadan or, in the USA, the dispute over the qiblah, when these are issues that are resolved by leadership not by disputes over technical points. Leadership of course is responsible for resolving the technical issues.

So we are clearly back to the two matters of knowledge and leadership. It is my considered view that Umar Vadillo is both the most knowledgeable man on this matter and its leader in that he identified the coinage and the mu'amalat as the key to ridding the world of the evils of usury-capitalism, and he worked dedicatedly to restore them in practice, in the process learning and acquiring a vast erudition from both Muslim and non-Muslim sources on both the utterly traditional Muslim perspective on mu'amalat as well as the ills of usury-capitalism. Umar Vadillo led in this matter when not one single person on the planet was talking about it, and he did so in the teeth of opposition from activists, academics, scholars and ulama. It is only thanks to his constancy that this matter is now on the agenda for most thinking Muslims around the world and, more significantly, is now a lived reality in Kelantan in Malaysia.

It makes absolutely no sense to me that people would come along with an extremely partial understanding of one issue, the coins, neglecting the whole outline of the mu'amalat, and think they can be independent of that leadership and expertise and knowledge of his. Here I am assuming good will and intellect.

As for divisive people who seek some kind of position in the world or who resent others because of the fadl that Allah has given them or who carry grudges for whatever reason, such people will always be around, but Allah warns us against them and warns us against becoming like them. Even in Madinah al-Munawwarah a group of people tried to set up a mosque in opposition to the mosque of Quba, and the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was ordered never ever to stand in it. The parallels are clear for those who think.

It is, however, conceivable that someone who is genuinely a knowledgeable leader can make a mistake and that someone else might have better knowledge on some issues, since no one short of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is immune from error, but in that case such a person is duty-bound to approach this matter through the known courtesies of commanding the right and forbidding the wrong. For those who do not know how that is done, this khutbah is based around a translation of a classical fiqh text by Ibn Juzayy on that: http://www.muslimsofnorwich.org.uk/?p=1202.

It would be the height of idiocy, and possibly even treachery, in these times when everywhere the Muslims are defeated and downtrodden, for us to fail to put aside differences and look within the deen itself for those things that will give us unity and then success.

In commentary on the du'a, twice repeated in the Qur'an, for Allah not to make us a fitnah for the kafirun, some of the salaf said that it means: let them not defeat us and so come to think that Islam is not true, so that then we become a fitnah for them.

And Allah knows best.
Abdassamad Clarke