Page 11 - Valentino Cattelan - In the name of God: managing risk in Islamic finance

IANUS n. 26-2022 ISSN 1974-9805

Determiner), al-Musawwir (Fashioner), al- Qadir (All-Powerful) and al-Qahhar
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(Dominator), each with various connotations of creating».
God being the only Creator, the Muslim lives ‘in surrender’ to God’s
omnipotence, as an agent of the only Actor, participating in the creation by performing
God’s Will, within a conception of time where the divine immediate creation is
inserted within the flow of contingent human agencies, and «the world comes to be
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at the time when the eternal will stands in nexus with its coming-to-be».
The complementary truths of God’s omnipotence and human responsibility, with
the corollary linkage between divine eternity and human history in the flow of time
(conceived as an atomistic succession of instants, each created by God), find their
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pivotal reconciliation through the Revelation of Shari‘ah (literally, ‘the road leading
to water’, the Way, the Path) (Q. XLV:18). In fact, in order to make human beings
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responsible for their actions and able to deserve His blessings, God has given the
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Qur’an, lit. ‘what is read’, the ‘recitation’, and sent the Prophet as reminder of the
Message («Say: “Nothing will happen to us except what Allah has decreed for us: He
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is our Protector”: and on Allah let the Believers put their trust»: Q. IX:51).
There are no obstacles for the believer to seek the right Way, the true
Guidance: «for the Muslim the whole religion itself is in a very real sense a
synonym of God’s guidance: Islam is “being rightly guided”». The Revelation
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is clear, and the clarity of Truth doesn’t require any imposition: «Let there be no
compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects Evil
and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never
breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all things» (Q. II:256). Anyway, the
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33 BURRELL, Creation, in WINTER (ed.), The Cambridge companion to classical Islamic theology,
Cambridge, 2008, 141.
34 Ghazali, as quoted in ORMSBY, Theodicy in Islamic thought. The dispute over al-Ghazali’s “Best of
all possible worlds”, cit., 193; for the alternative conceptualization of freedom in Islam, see WATT,
Islamic alternatives to the concept of free will, in La notion de liberté au Moyen Age. Islam, Byzance, Occident,
Paris, 1985, 15-24.
35 In this regard, see the illuminating BÖWERING, The concept of time in Islam, in Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, 141 (1), 1997, 55-66.
36 CALDER, Shari‘ah, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, II ed., 1978.
37 «The Qur’an as a whole… maintains human responsibility at the same time as it asserts divine
omnipotence… In the end, then, the Qur’an simply holds fast to the complementary truths of God’s
omnipotence and man’s responsibility» (BELL, Introduction to the Qur’an, Edinburgh, 1970, 150-152).
38 This is in Islam the Way, the Guidance that expresses the decision by God intervening under the form
of a communication concerning human actions; in this sense, according to Stelzer, «divine law is a
manifestation of the divine Word» (STELZER, Ethics, in WINTER (ed.), The Cambridge companion to classical Islamic
theology, Cambridge, 2008, 169). See also GOLDZIHER, Introduction to Islamic theology and law, New Jersey, 1981.
39 NETTON, Allah transcendent: studies in the structure and semiotics of Islamic philosophy, theology
and cosmology, cit., 24-25.
40 «The truth is clear, settled, and definitely convincing… The truth stands here, facing us; it is presented
to us. The truth in its completeness is submitted to us as clarity-for-us… The truth, established and
secured by its certainty, makes no distinction between “momentary” and “eternal”. The truth is valid
not because it has ascended above the nonlasting; the truth is valid because it stands firmly established

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