Page 24 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

5. The spirit of capitalism and the ghost of Orientalism: trust, money, and
religion in the differentiation culture of modernity

The deep interconnection between religion and money that has been at the
background of this article in relation to the notion of trust, so to provide a more
critical understanding of the notion of risk-sharing in Islamic finance and its
(supposed) social impact, appears in a more immediate way if one looks at the
etymological origin of the word ‘finance’.
As explained by the Oxford English Dictionary, the term derived directly from
the old French finance, noun of action of the verb finer (finir in contemporary
French), meaning «to end» and so, consequently, «to settle (finish, conclude) a
dispute or a debt» .
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To put an end to a credit relation through finance, as an expression of secular
life, matches a religiosity whose Life (as social unity) mirrors, in Christianity, the
end of human life. In the same way, the perpetuation of the social relation through
money in an «endless cycle of extensions and intensifications of value»
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corresponding to an Afterlife conceived in Christian religion as the infinite Credit
promised by God, Debtor of salvation.
Thus, both in Weber’s spirit of capitalism (1958) and in Simmel’s religiosity of
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money (1989 and 1990) , «debt [becomes central] as a structuring principle in key
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soteriological traditions within Christian thought. Not 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» .
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If this religiosity of Credit can summarize the relation religion + finance that
belongs to the spirit of capitalism in the West, one can reasonably doubt that the
same religiosity affects the conceptualization of risk-sharing in Islamic finance,
for at least three reasons.
First, the concept of original sin does not exist in Islam: so, there is no
conceptual idea of some sort of inherited debt towards God from which the human
being should be liberated (for which Credit has been given). In fact, Islam teaches
that Adam and Eve sinned, but then sought forgiveness and were forgiven by God
(Q. 20:121-122: «… Thus did Adam disobey his Lord, so he went astray. Then
his Lord chose him, and turned to him with forgiveness, and gave him guidance»).
Second, in Islam there is no strong significance about the concept of

82 OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, online version at http:// www.oed.com (last access 10 June
2024).
83 BLUMENBERG, Money or Life: metaphors of Georg Simmel’s philosophy, op. cit., 249; also quoted
in Section 2 of this article.
84 WEBER, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, op. cit.
85 SIMMEL, Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie, Berlin, 1989, op. Cit.; SIMMEL, The
philosophy of money, London, 1990, op. cit.
86 SINGH, Sovereign debt, op. cit., 239 (see also, in the present article, note 54).

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