Why YouTube at all
Because this is where most of the contemporary English-language fiqh actually lives now. Three reasons it matters for this project:
- Reach — NAK alone has hundreds of hours of khutbah specifically on financial matters.
- Plain language — these scholars are speaking to Western Muslims, not to other scholars. The vocabulary matches the audience.
- Time-stamping — citing a video at
12:34is verifiable in a way that paraphrasing a private conversation is not.
Channels indexed
Tier A — primary
YouTube channel
Bayyinah Institute & Nouman Ali Khan
Nouman Ali Khan
Khutbahs and tafsir lectures. Foundational for the Why section — his tafsir of al-Baqarah 2:275–281 is the single best contemporary English exposition of those verses.
YouTube channel
Mufti Menk
Mufti Ismail Menk
Concise reminders and Q&A on finance, debt, mortgages. Accessible language; broadly aligned with mainstream Hanafī positions. Useful for short, citable answers.
YouTube channel
Assim Al-Hakeem
Sheikh Assim Al-Hakeem
Q&A on practical fiqh. Salafī methodological lens — strict on contemporary Islamic banking products. Important counterweight to Hanafī-leaning permissive opinions on Murābaḥah-based mortgages.
YouTube channel
Yaqeen Institute / Yasir Qadhi
Dr. Yasir Qadhi
Long-form lectures on contemporary fiqh including Western Muslim finance. Methodologically rigorous; willing to address the hard questions head-on.
YouTube channel
Omar Suleiman
Dr. Omar Suleiman
Khutbahs framing riba and consumerism inside a broader moral framework — useful for the Why section's case beyond pure fiqh.
Tier B — supporting
YouTube channel
Joe Bradford
Joe Bradford
The single most relevant English-language voice on Western Islamic finance specifically. Direct critique of Murābaḥah mortgages, frank discussion of ḥiyal, practical guidance. The primary source for The Audit.
YouTube channel
AlMaghrib Institute
Lecture series on classical fiqh including transactions (muʿāmalāt). Lower trust here only because of volume — needs filtering for the specific lectures on riba.
Tagging schema
Each transcript chunked in the corpus carries:
scholar— exact attributionlecture_titleurl+timestamptopic— riba | mortgage | islamic_banking | partnerships | etc.madhab_lens— Hanafī | Salafī | Mālikī | comparative | nonevetted_at— date a human checked the Arabic termsconfidence— high if vetted, medium otherwise