Page 18 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

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finance since grounded in Islamic religion and the divergence between its theory
and practice , one may raise a more critical approach towards the ‘Islamic
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alternative to mainstream capitalism’ by referring to the aforementioned concept
of religiosity, as used by Simmel, both in terms of (1) ‘belief / trust’ and (2)
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experience of social unity , as located within the hermeneuts of the ‘money kite’
(section 1).
In fact, if there is no doubt that the rise and global spread of ‘Islamic finance
money’ certainly relates to a post-colonial reconstruction of the identity of the
Muslim world, hence becomes functional to the recognition of brothers in the
Muslim faith (in terms of (2) social unity), some reluctance can be advanced about
the capability of Islamic risk-sharing to defeat the conceptualization of the other in
economic (1) belief / trust, due to the impersonalised nature of the current
financial markets. The operativity of Islamic risk-sharing follows today standards
of the global market that substantially impede (if not at the level of microcredit
and local enterprises) to restore the (local) communities (in the sociological sense
of Gemeinschaft, hence of a community-oriented risk management in form of
mutuality and cooperation) of merchants that existed in the Muslim (as well as in
the Christian) Middle Ages.
At the same time, by applying the ‘money kite’ approach, one may also
recognize how the study of Islamic finance (both by its Muslim promoters, and
non-Muslim critics) has been deeply affected by a conceptual displacement (i.e.,
a substantial lack of a ‘centre of gravity’ in the assessment of the nature of the
‘kite’) in favour of the corners of morality and religion (as transcendental entity,
deprived of its social manifestations as in Simmel’s religiosity). More precisely,
- if, on the one side, the religion-backed reputation of Islamic financial
institutions has usually offered a corresponding ‘moral advantage’ in their
perception from the market as socially responsible investors, hence
facilitating the claim that they can contribute to the advance of social
finance (pushing on the ‘corner’ of religion against those of economics and
finance, and so removing a critical perspective on the morality of their
results);
- on the other side, no in-depth analysis has been undertaken about the
relationship between the ‘corners’ of Islamic religion and finance as
necessarily connected (next to morality and economics) in the ‘money kite’.
Indeed, if one assumes that Christianity allows an equilibrium between
dispersed finite credit and a unified infinite Credit (God’s promise of
redemption), can the debt/Debt logic structure that belongs to Christianity
been replicated in Islam, whose theology assumes, in reverse, a God who

62 CATTELAN, Islamic finance and ethical investments. Some points of reconsideration, op. cit., see in
this article, note 19.
63 EL-GAMAL, Islamic finance: law, economics, and practice, Cambridge - New York, 2006.
64 NELSON, The idea of usury…, op. cit., see previously.

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