Page 27 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

IANUS n. 29-2024 ISSN 1974-9805

rational, or even irrational) human nature. On the other side, and in reverse to the
rational construction of the Western identity in modern times, we tend to look at
the Islamic ‘money kite’ as intrinsically ‘moral’ and ‘religious’, with the
consequent risk of losing the barycentre of the kite as if its flight would have been
haunted by a ghost and not managed by a spirit.
It is in the cultural de-construction of this antithetical relation between the
96
(rational and secular) spirit of capitalism and the (irrational and spiritual) ghost
97
of Orientalism that the representation of Islamic finance (both in the Occident
and in the Orient) may find a clearer horizon to make its kite fly in a more
balanced way. Since money (like law), in the end, «here [in the West], there [in
the East], or anywhere, is [always] part of a distinctive manner of imagining the
98
real» .

96 WEBER, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, op. cit.
97 SAID, Orientalism, op. cit.
98 I paraphrase here, again, Geertz’s depiction of law as a cultural entity: GEERTZ, Local
knowledge: fact and law in a comparative perspective, op. cit., 184.

121