Page 17 - Valentino Cattelan - In the name of God: managing risk in Islamic finance

IANUS n. 26-2022 ISSN 1974-9805

property (muthamman) to the insured in return. Likewise, the insurer has received
property (muthamman) without paying a price (thaman) in exchange. Accordingly,
the trade fails because it entails “consuming the property of another unjustly” (akl
amwal al-nas bi-al-batil)”. In the view of the jurists, it is unjust for the insurer to
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keep the property of the insured without ever giving him property in return».

4. Conclusions: another, remarkable, story of risk?

Sailing (metaphorically) the Mediterranean from its Western to the Arab side,
in search for firm land (the Greek ριζα) to avoid the perils of the sea, this article
has moved from the Western risk to the Arabic rizq ﻕﺯﺭ, in the attempt to provide
an interpretation of risk management within the distinctive anthropology of
Islamic finance.
In this direction, it has been suggested that in order to look at the hazard of the
future, ﺮﻫﺯ zahr, the ‘dice’ of human chances, through an inter-cultural approach,
Bernstein’s Remarkable story of risk should be read not ‘against’, but ‘in the Name
of God’. Indeed, in an anthropology of time where not only the future, but also
the present, is a divine (rather than human) creation, the conception of risk is re-
framed at its very roots, leading to criteria of risk management that cannot leave
aside the ‘real’/‘right’ (haqq) of God’s (Haqq) creation. Thus, primacy of real
economy, exchange equilibrium and the pursuit of profit-loss sharing become the
cornerstone of any legitimate human profit (kharaj) as a result of an assumption
of liability (daman); and the paradigm of banking, insurance and investment
activities, necessarily framed in the light of asset- backed and commercial
enterprises, becomes hardly comparable to the conventional one.
Of course, the voyage from the Western risk to the Arabic rizq ﻕﺯﺭ, and then
daman ﻦمﺿ as human responsibility for performing Shari‘ah as source of legitimate
profit (ﺝﺮﺧ kharaj), has been roughly ‘mapped’ in these pages, and rapidly sketched:
much further investigation is needed for a comparative history of risk, according to
an inter-cultural perspective. But, to the extent to which this article may represent
a little contribution to the matter, two final considerations are advanced, both with
regard to the Western and Islamic theories of risk management, and to their current
co-existence in the international financial market.
First, looking at both sides of the Mediterranean, another protagonist, next to
risk, should be considered for a comprehensive, comparative financial theory: the
idea of ‘credit’, and credit management. In this regard, if in Bernstein’s Against the
gods the role of Christian thought in the history of risk is marginalized, the great
cultural historian Jacques Le Goff, in contrast, has highlighted how religion must
not be forgotten when writing the history of money and credit in Western

57 FADEL, The regulation of risk in Islamic law, the common law, and federal regulatory law, cit., 83.

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