History of IMC to IDCC

The council is held by its Shariah Supervisory Board. Muftī Asim Patel sits as Director of Shariah and Sheikh Imran Mehrban as Head of Certification, and the rulings behind every certificate sit with them.

The man who established the council stepped down once they were on board, handed it to the ʿulamā, and asked that his name be left off it. The council has kept to that. What follows is how it began, recorded the way the council records it, with no name in it.

How it began

A Muslim technology specialist — a certified member and assayer of the Muslim Assayers Council, certified by the British Royal Mint, twenty-two years spent building technology for governments and for some of the largest companies in the world — was walking in his garden.

He had a genuine concern, and he had seen the cause of it from inside the trade. He was part of a mint striking Dīnār and Dirham to the historical weights. Coins were leaving it correct in weight and fineness, and there was no authority anywhere that would certify them as such.

The World Gold Council and the LBMA set the standards the bullion trade runs on, but neither recognised the Dīnār or the Dirham as a form, and no Islamic body was publishing weights, fineness and certification that a buyer anywhere in the world could check. What left him flabbergasted was the realisation that no company was going to step forward and do it. If it was going to exist, someone had to build it.

The idea came to him there in the garden. Build a digital certification council of its own, with a hologram QR code, proprietary to the council and to be patented, that scans a piece of gold or silver against a certification record anchored on a blockchain. Behind it a unique algorithm, so that a customer scanning a coin or a bar gets a result in real time rather than a promise, and a human being stands behind that result.

That last requirement is why the Muslim Assayers Council came into place. A licensed assayer signs the assay, so a scan resolves to a qualified person’s judgement and not to a database row alone. The council was established to fill the gap, and the Tayyib certified scanner was built with it, so that a single piece of certified metal could be verified against a public register rather than a printed claim.

The Islamic Monetary Council was founded on that, inspired by the coinage commissioned under Sayyidunā ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (raḍiyallāhu ʿanhu). The Dīnār and the Dirham were standardised under his leadership, and that commission is what fixes the Dīnār at 4.25 g of gold and the Dirham at 3.0618 g of silver to this day.

The range mattered. Certifying a physical asset against a public register touches assaying, logistics, payments, identity and cryptography at once, and the work drew on every one of these sectors:

Very soon after the council was founded he brought Muftī Asim Patel on board as Director of Shariah, and then Sheikh Imran Mehrban as Head of Certification, so that the fiqh and the assay each sat with a named, qualified person from the outset.

As the work grew, more people joined it. Having brought them on, he stepped down and handed the council to the ʿulamā, so that the rulings behind every certificate would sit with qualified scholars rather than with its founder. The IMC became the MAC and the register it signs, and both now sit inside the Islamic Digital Certification Council, whose scope has widened from gold and silver to blockchain assets, vehicles, finance, nikāḥ certificates and more.