Page 6 - Valentino Cattelan - In the name of God: managing risk in Islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

the French risque, the English risk, the Spanish riesgo and the German Risiko, all
derive), a more ancient etymology of the word ‘risk’, in contrast, remains
uncertain. The Latin forms may have derived from the Greek ριζα, meaning
‘root’, ‘stone’, ‘cut of the firm land’, which was also used as a metaphor for a
‘difficulty to avoid in the sea’. For the ancient Greeks the uncertainty of survival
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in the Mediterranean was caused by the whims of gods like Zeus and Poseidon,
and the ‘stone’ of the firm land as well as the ‘root’ of a tree were symbolic images
of a lifeline, securing the sailors from the perils of the sea. Quite interestingly, the
classical Greek ριζα seems to find (at least phonetically) an equivalent in the
Arabic rizq (ﻕﺯﺭ), from which the word ‘risk’ may derive, too: the term may have
been absorbed by ancient pre-Islam Arabic from Greek, via Mediterranean
contacts, or vice-versa. The rich legacy of such contacts is also witnessed by the
word ‘hazard’, that moved into English from the French hasard and the Spanish
azar, both (certainly) coming from the Arabic ﺮﻫﺯ zahr, meaning ‘dice’, thus the
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chance of human luck.
But, apart from this digression on probable linguistic transmissions through
the Mediterranean, if rizq on the one side expresses the idea of ‘fortune’, ‘profit’,
‘gain’, ‘blessing’ (thus, safety from the perils of life, as in the etymology of ριζα
and later ‘risk’), on the other side, and quiet remarkably, this fortune is depicted
and conceived in Arabic language in the particular sense of «a sustenance that is
given by God for livelihood». Accordingly, the verb razaqa is always used in the
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sense of ‘God providing somebody with means of subsistence’; ﺍﺯﺮﻟﺍ ar-razzaq, ‘the
Maintainer’, ‘the Provider’ is one of the ninety-nine attributes of God; and ﻕﻭﺯﺮﻣ
marzuq is the ‘person blessed by God’, thus ‘fortunate’, ‘prosperous’, ‘successful’.
At a very preliminary glance, therefore, the secular nature embedded in modern
Western ‘risk’ stays far apart from the Arabic rizq, where the future and its
fortunes are given by God.
To the extent to which the phonetic connection between the Greek ριζα and
the Arabic rizq may been tentatively suggested and is certainly thought-provoking,
it seems to me that their distant meanings may also offer a clue (or at least an
intellectual temptation) to broaden Bernstein’s history of risk by adopting a

15 In this sense, for instance, SKJONG, Etymology of risk. Classical Greek origin - Nautical expression -
Metaphor for “difficulty to avoid the sea”, 2005, available online at the following address
http://research.dnv.com/skj/Papers/etimology-of-risk.pdf. Indeed, it is of interest that «these
lexical borrowings happened in the end of the middle-ages, when mentalities woke up and people
dared to discover the world. So that from the 16th century on, the term got a benefit meaning, for
example in middle-high-German Rysigo … a technical term for business, with the meaning “to dare,
to undertake, enterprise, hope for economic success”» (ID.).
16 BERNSTEIN, Against the gods: the remarkable story of risk, cit., 13. Both the Greek ριζα and the
Arabic rizq (ﻕﺯﺭ) may even find a common Indo-European or Semitic root (a hypothesis of ancient
comparative linguistics which is, of course, far beyond my expertise and the aims of this writing).
Speaking of risk (and my personal risk-aversion), anyway, I would not put my money neither on
ριζα nor ﻕﺯﺭ as the very first origin of the term and its related meaning(s).
17 WEHR, A dictionary of modern written Arabic, ed. by J M. Cowan, IV ed., Wiesbaden, 1994.

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