Page 10 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

- starting from the ‘kite sides’ of the interaction finance + economics (section 2)
- and that of economics + morality (the social nature of money, its ethical
dimension, so in the light of the ‘moral economy’) (section 3)
- to the sides of the relation morality + religion (regarding the social impact
of Islamic finance) (section 4),
- and that of the interconnection between the most internal and most external
circles (i.e., respectively, finance and religion: section 5), so to look at these
kite corners as much more interdependent as it is commonly assumed.
All this will lead to some conclusive comparative reflections about the
differentiation cultures that we (Western or non-Western, Muslims or non-
Muslims) commonly apply as practical certaint-ies in the evaluation of the
20
impact of trust in our secular / religious behaviours, and how this divergent
assessment can lead to alternative interpretation about the nature of the financial
system.

2. Credit: money and Life

In a fragment of his diary (Tagebuch), published posthumous in1919/1920 (ed.
21
Kroner and Mehlis) and later in 1923 (ed. Kantorowicz) , the great German
sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918), author of The philosophy of money (1900) ,
22
writes that «[m]oney is society’s only creation that is pure energy, completely
disjointed from the material object it stands for, making it an absolute symbol. It
is the most significant creation of our times to the extent that its existence has

20 On the epistemological impact of ‘certainty’ in our formulation of judgements, my primary
reference goes to WITTGENSTEIN, On certainty, Oxford, 1969.
21 SIMMEL, Aus Georg Simmels nachgelassenem Tagebuch, in KRONER – MEHLIS (eds), Logos,
Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, 8, 1919/1920, 121-151; SIMMEL, Fragmente und Aufsätze
aus dem Nachlaβ und Veröffentlichungen der letzten Jahre (ed. Kantorowicz), Munich, 1923, 1-46.
22 SIMMEL, The philosophy of money, London, 1990 (first edition 1900).

104