The five-ruling scheme's durability rests on its capacity to absorb entirely novel questions the classical jurists never anticipated, and looking at how contemporary scholars have sorted a few modern cases shows the framework still doing live interpretive work.
Smoking became contested only after tobacco reached the Muslim world, and rulings shifted as medical knowledge changed: early jurists, lacking evidence of harm, often placed it at makruh or mubah; as evidence accumulated, modern fatwa councils moved it toward haram, reasoning from the principle that deliberately harming oneself is forbidden, while others retain makruh, on the ground that the harm is not certain enough to meet the stricter evidentiary threshold haram usually requires.
Cryptocurrency shows the scheme handling a question with no premodern analogue: fatwa councils split between treating it as legitimate property (mal), generally mubah subject to the ordinary rules against fraud and excessive uncertainty (gharar), and treating its volatility and lack of backing as itself a form of gharar severe enough to move it toward haram or makruh, with rulings varying by jurisdiction and instrument.
Organ donation shows the scheme resolving toward near-consensus: early hesitation over the sanctity of the body has given way, in most contemporary fatwa councils including Al-Azhar, to permitting or recommending donation as mustahabb, an act of lifesaving charity, on the ground that preserving another's life outweighs the classical concern for bodily integrity after death.