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One of the more quietly profound teachings in Islamic financial ethics concerns how we treat debt — not just whether we repay it, but how promptly, and what our delay communicates about our character. The Prophet (peace be upon him) stated plainly: procrastination in paying debts by a wealthy person is injustice. Not carelessness. Not poor planning. Injustice — a word carrying moral and social weight.

This sits within the chapter on Al-Hawaala, the Islamic mechanism for transferring a debt…

A powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck eastern Indonesia early Saturday, killing at least five people and triggering regional tsunami alerts in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. The disaster unfolded as global markets priced in heightened geopolitical risk: oil rose 1.4% to $⁠82.40, with traders watching the Strait of Hormuz after Iran’s foreign minister said no decision had been made on returning to talks with the US, and that shipping through the strait depends on Washington…

A comment made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week has drawn sharp criticism from political allies and opponents alike. Describing the United Kingdom as “the first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon,” Netanyahu appeared to be responding to British diplomatic pressure over Gaza. His own political rivals in Israel called the remark a “horrific diplomatic failure” — an attack on a longstanding international ally at a moment when Israel needs friends, not fewer of…

For a while I’ve been playing around with Mu - an open source project that provides tools for agents behind one MCP server and app.

You can find it on github https://github.com/micro/mu.

I started to wonder how to turn this into something I could run and charge money for. Then spent some time building out payments using stripe and a top-up credit model. Eventually getting tired of that, I realised agents should probably do this without an account using Coinbase’s…

Mu’s news streaming now remembers the guardrails. When you ask for recent news, the answer is built with a caveat attached to the first visible line — a plain statement of how fresh the search results are. That caveat used to vanish during reconnection: if the stream was interrupted or the answer finalized and later replayed, the text could appear without the preliminary note, making older data sound current. That is no longer the case.

The change is simple. The freshness-guarded wording is…

The US escalated its economic pressure on Iran, with Treasury Secretary Bessent promising a combination of “economic isolation like the world has never seen before” and the continued blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, while the Navy works to relieve the troubled carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Oil prices edged up slightly to $⁠81.35, reflecting ongoing tension in the Gulf, even as gold and silver slipped. The move comes as the US also faces a growing water crisis—Lake Mead, the largest reservoir…

The story of the Queen of Sheba in Surah An-Naml is brief, but its political wisdom is remarkable. When a threatening letter arrived from Solomon, Bilqis did not react. She did not convene a war council to confirm what she had already decided. She gathered her advisors, laid the matter before them honestly, and said something that leaders across the centuries have found surprisingly difficult: I will not decide without you.

Her chiefs responded confidently — they had the military strength,…

The Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, with Iran’s Persian Gulf Authority insisting it will not reopen until its conditions are accepted, directly contradicting claims from the US. Oil prices edged down 0.2% to $⁠83.13, but the disruption continues to threaten global supply chains. Meanwhile, three Palestinian families in Qusra, occupied West Bank, remain besieged in their homes by Israeli settlers, a stark reminder of the ongoing daily pressures in the region.

The UK is grappling with extreme…

The hadith shared today is deceptively simple. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said that a believer to another believer is like a building whose different parts enforce each other — and then he clasped his hands together, fingers interlaced, to show what he meant. It is one of the most visual teachings in the entire prophetic tradition, and its implications run far deeper than community warmth.

The image is structural. A building does not hold together because its bricks like each…

Oil prices climbed on Wednesday after deadly Houthi attacks on vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Oman killed six people, the first fatalities in over a year, heightening supply concerns and straining global shipping routes. The US struck a containership in response, while Trump claimed the US “owns” the Hormuz strait and Iran laid out conditions to reopen it. Brent crude rose 0.5% to $⁠83.60, while gold and silver also edged higher as safe-haven demand persisted. The violence in the Red Sea…

One of the quieter tensions in modern life is between the human need to be recognised and the spiritual reality that true greatness belongs to none of us. The name Al-Mutakabbir — one of the ninety-nine names of Allah — points directly at this. It means the Supremely Great, the One whose greatness is absolute and self-originating. Not earned, not performed, not dependent on the approval of others. This is a quality that belongs to Allah alone, and the tradition is clear: for a human being…

A small change to how Mu handles news searches: when the available results are older than the current day for a date-sensitive query, the answer now leads with a freshness caveat before listing any stories. The caveat appears first, not buried at the end.

This matters because news is about timing. If you ask about today’s event and the only indexed articles are from two days ago, seeing that upfront saves you from skimming a list that looks current but isn’t. The caveat is plain: “The…

Oil prices edged higher again today, with Brent trading at $⁠82.41, as the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz continued to rattle markets. Donald Trump’s claim of “total control” of the strait and demand for Iran to pay reparations has deepened the deadlock, with traders doubting any imminent deal. The tension pushed gold up 0.7% to $⁠4,451, while risk assets like bitcoin fell 1.6% to $⁠63,969, failing to hold $⁠65,000 for a fourth…

The eighth chapter of the Quran opens in the aftermath of the Battle of Badr — a moment when a small, outnumbered community had just survived an existential threat. Verse 8:30 is striking in its directness: enemies had gathered to capture, kill, or exile the Prophet. Three options, all designed to end the mission before it could take root. And yet the verse resolves not in triumph or vengeance, but in a simple observation — they planned, and Allah planned, and Allah is the best of…

Today, the model context protocol is what we’re all standardising on for communication between agents and tools. To facilitate this tool access, I’ve embedded an MCP server in Mu which agents can use to access the blog, news, chat, video and so on. It also includes mail if they need to send emails and things like market data.

See https://micro.mu/mcp for more details

Ten years ago I started a company called Micro. The idea was simple: standardise the building blocks of software so developers could share infrastructure the way Google does internally. Open source, open standards, open APIs. A kind of lego system for the internet.

It was a Go framework first. Go Micro. Thousands of developers used it. We raised venture capital. We built a platform. And then we ran into the wall that every open source company hits — the business model doesn’t work. You…

Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz remain the dominant story, with the US reaffirming its grip on the blockade by turning away 55 ships as talks stall, according to CNBC. Oil prices edged up 0.4% to $⁠78.47, but the market seems to have priced in the protracted crisis. Meanwhile, President Trump is accusing Exxon Mobil and Chevron of making “too much money” from the windfall,…

There is a striking intimacy in one of Allah’s names that often gets overlooked. Al-Mujeeb — the Responder to Prayer — does not simply mean that Allah occasionally answers those who call upon Him. The Arabic root suggests something closer to a standing readiness: He is already listening, already inclined toward the one who calls, before the words have fully formed.

This matters more than it might first appear. The world those words enter today is one saturated with noise — wars…

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