Page 12 - Valentino Cattelan - In the name of God: managing risk in Islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

clarity of the Truth does not mean that it is manifest, and ilm al-fiqh (literally
‘science of comprehension’, ‘understanding’) is the discipline specifically aimed
at making manifest God’s Will as clearly revealed in the Qur’an and exemplified
by the Prophet (sunna).
To summarize the anthropology of Islam, as depicted by Netton in the
Qur’anic Creator Paradigm, Muslim conception of life «embraces a God who (1)
creates ex nihilo; (2) acts definitely in historical time; (3) guides His people in such
time [through Shari‘ah]; and (4) can in some way be known indirectly by His
creation [in the light of the understanding of the Revelation through fiqh]».
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Indeed, in the total sovereignty by God to create everything that comes-to-
exist, the ‘real’ itself (haqq, which is one of the name of God: al-Haqq) holds a
meaning of ‘Truth’ as being ‘right’: in other terms, it fosters a conception of the
reality as being essentially ethical, a product of God’s Will in the unity (tawhid) of
the creation as the only (real, true, just) ‘Actor’, of which the believers are ‘agents’.
«A vision of the reality as being in its essence imperative, a structure not of
objects but of wills. The moral and the ontological change places, at least from our
point of view. […] The “real” here is deeply moralized, active, demanding real, not
a neutral, metaphysical “being”, merely sitting there awaiting observation and
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reflection; a real of prophets not of philosophers».
Thus, the ‘right’ ontologically acquires a ‘tangible’, ‘real’ nature (not by chance
‘reality’ is one of the various meaning of haqq (pl. huquq), next to ‘truth’ and
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‘right’), as a ‘concrete’ entity whose allocation is provided by God (through the
benevolence of His blessing, ﻕﺯﺭ), in the light of Shari‘ah: and, coherently, it is the
performance of Shari‘ah that makes the human being responsible (damin) for his
actions, thus deserving what is due (kharaj).
Coming back now to our topic of discussion, to which extent does this ontological
nature of the ‘right’ affect the idea of risk and the practice of risk management?
Indeed, in a reality where everything is an immediate divine creation and the ‘right’
(haqq) subsists within the performance of Shari‘ah, if the future remains an (economic)
opportunity, it is not anymore a ‘human product’ but the result of the human
participation in the divine creation of the ‘real’ as an agent of the only ‘Actor’. It is this
dual canon of ‘participation’ and ‘agency’ that logically implies in Islamic finance a
conceptualization of risk that tends towards the primacy of the real economy over
finance, exchange equilibrium, as well as risk-sharing strategies in financial dealings.
In a nutshell, paraphrasing Bernstein, the actions we dare to take, which
depend on how responsible we are in performing Shari‘ah in the reality created by
God, are what the story of risk in Islamic finance is all about.

amid the flow of things nonlasting» (SMIRNOV, Understanding justice in an Islamic context: some points of
contrast with Western theories, in Philosophy East and West, 46 (3), 1996, 338).
41 NETTON, Allah transcendent: studies in the structure and semiotics of Islamic philosophy, theology
and cosmology, cit., 22.
42 GEERTZ, Local knowledge. Further essays in interpretive anthropology, New York, 1983, 177-178.
43 LANE, Arabic-English lexicon, 8 Vols., 1865. Available online at http://www.laneslexicon.co.uk.

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