Page 23 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

IANUS n. 29-2024 ISSN 1974-9805

Interestingly, the report does not offer valuable statistical data about the
current overlap between Islamic finance and social impact, but suggests a way
forward, by referring to Islamic finance as a «more ethical market» , and so
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indirectly assuming again that risk-sharing (equity) enjoys a higher moral status than
risk-shifting (debt).
It is this intersection between the narrative of the inherent social nature of
Islamic finance through risk-sharing and its intrinsic ethical/religious background
to be particularly puzzling, as if this background would be purposively able by
itself, and without the need to consider decisive elements of corporate governance
and social capital structure, to provide major economic equality, empowerment
and welfare.
In fact, this assumed overlap should also be read in a comparative perspective
with the morality of modern capitalism, where the credit conceptualization of trust
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towards the other (as the ‘new’ brother in the capitalist system ) seems to be
sustained by the social unity of Christian Credit: the absolute value of the human
being in the religious conceptualization of the Credit par excellence, God’s grace.
In the end, the distance of Islamic finance from conventional capitalism (if
beyond the surface of the latter strong theological assumptions can be found, while
over the surface of Islamic finance religious tenets are, in reverse, proudly
declared) may be better interpreted only by ‘closing’ the rectangle of the ‘money
kite’ on the ‘sides’ of religion and finance, and by looking at the two resulting
‘kites’ through a comparison West / Islam through evaluating how the cultural
differentiation between Western money and Islamic money operates.
That is to say (this is my suggestion),
- first by showing how the ‘side’ religion + finance in Islamic money re-
elaborates the Credit religiosity of the spirit of conventional capitalism in
terms of Ownership, hence moving somehow from a ‘contract law’ to a
‘property law’ religious background for finance and economics in the
morality of the market;
- second, by highlighting how, if the ‘side’ religion + finance differently
characterizes Western (Christian?) and Islamic money, it is the persistence
of a practice of cultural differentiation between the West and the East,
which belongs to modernity itself, that keeps representing the non-Western
(non-modern) Ownership religiosity of the market of Islamic finance not as
it was a spirit, but following the plot of a ghost story: the (in)famous story of
Orientalism .
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79 ID., 47.
80 NELSON, The idea of usury…, op. cit.
81 SAID, Orientalism, op. cit.

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