Page 17 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

IANUS n. 29-2024 ISSN 1974-9805

Till this point of the article, we have seen how modern capitalism and his
money as «part of a distinctive way of imagining the real» (to quote, again,
Geertz ) has shaped the financial growth of the West in the last centuries. But, as
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already mentioned, what is significant in recent global history is the emergence of
an alternative model of economic dealings coming from a non-Western and non-
Christian civilization: the Muslim world, with the development of the Islamic
financial market.
Islamic finance has grown at an impressive rate from the 1960s, covering both
banking and insurance business (the industry of takaful), as well as offering
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alternative financial products (so called sukuk) in capital markets . Recently,
following the new trends of the global economy, Islamic crowd-funding
platforms, FinTech instruments and Islamic cryptocurrencies have also appeared.
Academic literature on Islamic finance is today enormous (from political
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science and legal studies to anthropological research ), and usually centred in
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the intrinsic morality of Islamic economic teachings: in particular, the prohibition
of interest (in Arabic, riba); the prohibition of excessive speculation (gharar) or
gambling (maysir); the ban of illicit investments for Islamic religion (e.g. alcohol,
pork, pornography…). Authors that have concentrated on the operative
mechanisms of Islamic finance have also underlined how its logic determines a
departure from risk-trading (hence risk-shifting, i.e., debt: see previously) to risk-
sharing (i.e. equity structures) : hence, a (supposed) restoration of a ‘community’
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(Gemeinschaft) of credit, against the ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) of modern capitalism,
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has been implied .
However, apart from the rhetorical claim of the ethical nature of Islamic

his article, in Christian thought «[n]ot only does God appear to uphold debt logic, but God…
becomes identified with debt and marked as a debtor. The divine sovereign as debtor and as
enforcing debt provides cues for earthly sovereigns and legitimates cultures of debt». For a broader
investigation about how «early Christian thinkers made use of monetary and economic concepts as
they created Christian doctrine, and how this close relationship between theology and money has
lent a sacred aura to economics as it developed in the West», please refer, again, to SINGH, Divine
currency: the theological power of money in the West, Stanford, 2018.
55 GEERTZ, Local knowledge: fact and law in a comparative perspective, op. cit., 184.
56 For a general introduction, AYUB, Understanding Islamic finance, Chichester, 2007 (see here,
note 7).
57 E.g., WARDE, Islamic finance in the global economy, Edinburgh, 2000; TRIPP, Islam and the moral
economy: the challenge to capitalism, Cambridge, 2006.
58 One of the first seminal contributions to the field was VOGEL - HAYES, Islamic law and finance.
Religion, risk and return, The Hague, 1998.
59 E.g., MAURER, Mutual life, limited: Islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason, Princeton,
2005; RUDNYCKYJ, Economy in practice: Islamic finance and the problem of market reason, in American
Ethnologist, 41 (1), 2014, 110-127.
60 The title of the volume by Askari et al. is quite revealing on the point: ASKARI et al., Risk sharing
in finance: the Islamic finance alternative, Singapore, 2012.
61 CATTELAN, “Equal for equal, hand to hand”: comparing Islamic and Western money, op. cit.

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