Page 14 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

by Devin Singh, the generalized abstraction on money (as «the possibility of all
values as the value of all possibilities») is «radicalized, according to Simmel, in
religion and in Christianity, in particular», as «[f]rom Christianity derives a notion
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of absolute human value» . Hence, «Christianity implants in Western culture an
idea of human worth exceeding any quantifiable categories. Simultaneously,
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money’s increasing ubiquity serves to degrade its own prestige» .
In other terms, if the finite secular lives of money are embedded in worldly social
relations, all of them have been subsumed by the Christian creed in the infinite
spiritual Life of the human being as religious being. It is to the humanity’s Credit
relation to the infinite subject – God, whose grace has been credited on humanity’s
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‘account’ in Christianity – that this article will come back in its final section.
At this point, by advancing a comparative perspective between Western and
Islamic finance, one may raise the question if (and how) a God who is not
conceived as a ‘Debtor of grace’ (Christianity) but as the exclusive, original, and
final ‘Proprietor’ of all the creation (Islam) can also differently affect the
conceptualization of money, shifting economic rationales (and morals) from debt
to equity, where the imagination of finite credit relations is replaced by the
imagination of an infinite ownership structure to which the human being (as
religious being) participates. Since, after all, if one transfers the words of famous
legal anthropologist Clifford Geertz about law to finance, money itself is nothing
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else than «part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real» .
Such a conceptual leap requires further investigation on the interaction
between economics and morality, so to de-construct the ‘kite’ while keeping its
unity and balance in the gravity centre to make it fly. For this purpose, the next
section will focus on the morals of modern capitalism as depicted in Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice, keeping the corner of religion somehow a bit aside, while
approaching it through the discussion of the morality of risk-sharing (equity) in the
contemporary market of Islamic finance.

3. Christian creed and the morals of capitalism: from The Merchant of Venice to
risk-sharing in Islamic finance

Born in Berlin in 1858 from an assimilated Jewish family, from a father who
converted to Roman Catholicism and a mother who converted to the Lutheran
Church, Georg Simmel was baptized himself as a Protestant when he was a child.
Together with Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, he co-founded in 1909 the
45

41 SINGH, Speculating the subject of money…, op. cit., 4.
42 ID., 8.
43 ID., 9.
44 GEERTZ, Local knowledge: fact and law in a comparative perspective, in GEERTZ (ed.), Local
knowledge. Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York, 1983, 184.
45 See previously, here, note 30.

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