Page 160 - IANUS n. 26 - Fideiussioni omnibus e intesa antitrust: interferenze e rimedi
P. 160

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]».
                                                                                    41
                  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
                                                            42
               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
                      43
               ‘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.

                                                   158
   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165