Page 26 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

of the real economy in Islamic economics derives) and by avoiding riba as a cause
of imbalance of the all-encompassing Ownership that belongs to Allah.
To sum up some ideas expressed in these pages, a quotation from a book on
the relationship between faith and money in times of financial crisis may be
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particularly useful. As far as the general description of its contents, the book tells
us that «[m]oney facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More
than a mere medium of exchange or a measure of value, it is the primary means
by which we manifest a faith unique to our secular age. But what happens when
individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit,
‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and
does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral
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terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today?» . The
interconnection between credo (‘religion’) and credit (‘finance’) is examined in the
volume in terms of a theological critique to capitalism, in the light of the persistent
effects of the 2008 economic crisis.
Similarly, in these pages we have observed how the interaction between money
and religion (credere as creed) shapes the notion of trust in the morality of modern
capitalism, through the exchange of impersonal credit, in a multiplicity of finite
relations, that are ‘backed’ by the infinite Credit promised by God in Christianity.
The comparative approach with Islamic finance has further revealed more about
the religion + finance postulates of Western capitalism, whose mechanisms of
risk-shifting do not correspond to the religious tenets of Islamic risk-sharing,
grounded in Allah’s infinite Ownership of all the creation, and then the entrustment
of the human beings in their property rights.
But, if both Western capitalism and Islamic finance have a religion + finance
background, why is our faith in the spirit of capitalism conceived as secular, while
their faith in the spirit of Islamic finance is perceived as religious, with the
consequent assumption of a social impact for Islamic risk-sharing?
To a certain extent, the question refers to issues beyond religion + finance
methodology, tackling the epistemological problem of global knowledge
production in social sciences , hence the postcolonial critiques of Eurocentrism
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with the claim of the universalism of Western modernity. The way through which
we look at the Western ‘money kite’, through the lenses of the differentiation
culture West vs. East, is deeply affected by an assumption of secularism («our
secular age», in the extract above) which reflects in our mind the construction of a
European modern world where ‘finance’ + ‘economics’ are products of rational
actors, while ‘morality’ and ‘religion’ belong to the spiritual (and somehow sovra-

93 TYNAN - MILESI - MÜLLER (2017, eds.), Credo credit crisis. Speculations on faith and money, op.
cit. (see section 1). The title of this book, not by chance, gave original inspiration for the title of this
article too.
94 ID.
95 On the subject, KEIM - ÇELIK - WÖHRER (eds.), Global knowledge production in the social sciences:
made in circulation, London - New York, 2014.

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