Page 164 - IANUS n. 26 - Fideiussioni omnibus e intesa antitrust: interferenze e rimedi
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VALENTINO CATTELAN





               together (commercial enterprises), since it  belongs to the capitals and workforce
               (mudaraba and musharaka); it is transferred in a sale (or in any other transaction,
               such as lease) since it belongs to the transferred property (murabaha, salam or ijarah).
                  With  specific  reference  to  the  ban  of  ‘unreasonable  uncertainty’,  and  in
               accordance with the reasoning followed in this article, El-Gamal interprets the
               prohibition of bay’ al- gharar in the sense of the ban of the ‘trading of risk (of loss)’,
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               as property per se.
                  Consequently, a conventional insurance contract, where the risk of negative
               events  is  transferred  from  the  beneficiary  to  the  insurer  with  the  contextual
               payment of a premium, is deemed invalid in Islamic finance, since the amounts
               exchanged by the insured and the insurer are unequal and depend upon uncertain
               future events. For these reasons, the insurance contract is replaced in Islamic
               finance by the takaful company, where, on the contrary, the risk is shared among
               the participants in a mutual guarantee linked to an investments fund, which may
               be structured as mudaraba or musharaka or according to a wakala (agency) contract
               related to the administration of the fund. Once again, the criteria of primacy of
               real economy, exchange equilibrium and profit-loss sharing dominate Islamic risk
               management.
                  In this context, an example of this alternative conceptualization is given below,
               with  regard  to  the  invalidity  of  a  conventional  insurance  contract:  «Take  an
               insurance contract. At T1, A, the insured, pays a premium to B, the insurer, in
               exchange  for  B’s  promise  to  protect  A  against  certain  losses  should  a
               predetermined contingency occur. A pays a thaman in the form of premiums but
               does not receive a muthamman, at least not immediately, in return. Likewise, B
               receives a muthamman but does not immediately deliver a thaman to A. After the
               parties enter into the insurance contract, one of the two scenarios is possible.
                  In the first scenario, the specified contingency occurs and B compensates A for
               the loss. From the perspective of the jurists, the money delivered from B to A is
               A’s muthamman that he receives in exchange for the premiums that he had already
               paid. Similarly, the money B pays A in this scenario is the thaman that B paid in
               order to receive A’s muthamman (premiums). Accordingly, they conclude that this
               exchange  is  invalid:  first,  because  it  involves  riba  (the  deferred  exchange  of
               money); and second, because of uncertainty in the thaman and the muthamman.
               Recall that the promise to indemnify against a loss cannot serve as the muthamman
               that would complete the exchange because it is not property that can be delivered
               to the insured.
                  In the second scenario, the term of the insurance contract is completed without
               the occurrence of the specified contingency. In this case, according to the jurists,
               there simply has been no exchange: although the insured has delivered property
               to  the  insurer  in  the  form  of  premiums,  the  insured  has  never  delivered  any


                  56  EL-GAMAL, An economic explication of the prohibition of gharar in classical Islamic jurisprudence,
                                 th
               Paper presented at the 4  International Conference on Islamic Economics, Leicester, UK, 2000.
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