Maysir

Gambling or games of chance. One of the three major prohibitions in Islamic finance (alongside riba and gharar). Financial transactions that resemble gambling — with speculative, chance-based outcomes rather than genuine economic activity — are considered maysir.

This prohibition extends to derivative instruments and speculative trading strategies where the outcome depends primarily on chance rather than productive economic activity. Conventional insurance is also considered by many scholars to contain elements of maysir.

Maysir is gambling — acquiring wealth by chance where one party's gain is precisely another's loss — prohibited alongside wine in Qur'an 5:90-91 as 'defilement from the work of Satan.' The classical form was a pre-Islamic arrow-shuffling lottery for camel meat; the doctrine generalizes to any zero-sum wager on an uncertain event: casino games, sports betting, lotteries, raffles purchased for consideration. In finance, maysir is the sharpest of the three screens (with riba and gharar) for evaluating speculative instruments.

Products widely failing it: binary options (pure event-wagers), naked derivatives settled in cash with no underlying delivery, spread betting, and leveraged daily-reset products where the structure itself is a coin-flip on short-term movement. Contested territory: day trading and options are analyzed by different scholars under maysir, gharar, or both — our verdict pages on options trading and day trading document the range — while long-term equity investing is broadly agreed NOT to be maysir, because stock returns derive from underlying business productivity, not from a counterparty's mirrored loss.

The analytical test scholars apply: is there a real economic activity generating the return, and would the transaction exist without the wager? Insurance illustrates the line's subtlety — conventional insurance resembles a wager on loss occurrence (one reason for Takaful's cooperative redesign), yet serves a protective purpose gambling lacks, which is why necessity-based permissions exist. Practical rule: if your gain requires someone else's symmetrical loss on a chance event, maysir applies.