Page 25 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

IANUS n. 29-2024 ISSN 1974-9805

redemption (in fact, there is no need a priori for redemption without original debt):
accordingly, the Credit of grace becomes substantially marginal. From a
theological stance, «[even] [i]f we do find in Islam the concept of redemption, in
various shapes and formulations… we have to define these phenomena as
marginal, transitory and certainly not essential in Islam» .
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Third, moving towards a dimension of economic theology, I suspect that, to
properly understand the spirit of Islamic finance (in Weberian terms) and which
rationales foster its own notion of risk-sharing, one should preliminarily move
from a contract law- to a property law-religiously connoted financial model to
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understand the morals of the Islamic market. In fact, there, in Islam, the ‘money
kite’ of financial religiosity seems to be built more on Ownership rather than Credit
structures.
Being Allah the only Creator and Owner of everything that exists, economic
actors in an Islamic financial system do not hold «separate portions of economic
justice» as individual credit positions, but they, on the contrary, «participat[e] in
the unique divine justice… by sharing economic resources» . Rectius, by holding
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temporary property positions as entrusted by God (the concept of khalifah as vice-
regent of God on earth is central in Islamic finance), for which they are claimed
responsible as trustees.
This paramount shift in eco-religious anthropology implies that if «all are
‘brothers’ in being equally ‘others’» in the (Christian) spirit of capitalism, in an
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(Islamic) spirit, instead, «all are ‘brothers’ in being equally ‘entrusted’ by Allah».
Each of these property relations (somehow owed to God, and not due to an equal
‘other’) melt in the all-encompassing Ownership position that belongs to Allah,
who becomes in this social landscape (the space of Islamic money) the Maintainer
par excellence, the Provider of any result of a successful economic enterprise,
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affecting the anthropology of risk and time in the horizon of Islamic finance.
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Correspondingly, this also defines the understanding of risk-sharing, whose
‘morality’ does not actually refer anymore to the social impact of the investment
(as remarked in section 4), but more precisely to a balanced allocation of resources
given by God through the legitimate trade of properties (from which the centrality

87 LAZARUS-YAFEH, Is there a concept of redemption in Islam?. in WERBLOWSKY - BLEEKER (eds.),
Types of redemption, Studies in the History of Religions XVIII, Leiden, 1970, 180.
88 In this regard, I made the attempt to investigate Islamic contract law in relation to religion in
the volume CATTELAN, Religion and contract law in Islam: from medieval trade to global finance,
Abingdon, UK - New York, US, 2023.
89 CATTELAN, Introduction. Babel, Islamic finance and Europe: preliminary notes on property rights
pluralism, in CATTELAN (ed.), Islamic finance in Europe: towards a plural financial system, Cheltenham,
UK - Northampton, MA, 2013, 7.
90 NELSON, The idea of usury, op. cit.
91 Both ‘Provider’ and ‘Maintainer’ are among the ninety-nine names of Allah in Islamic
religion.
92 On this specific point, please refer to CATTELAN, In the Name of God: managing risk in Islamic
finance, in IANUS – Diritto e Finanza, 26, 2022, 149-164.

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