Page 6 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

kite’ may represent a very handy hermeneutical tool in the study of credit and risk
management, also in relation to the idea of uncertainty, as well as for the
investigation of issues of comparative finance and for the search of alternative
business models beyond Western capitalism. This comparative approach can
offer relevant elements of reflection in a bilateral way. On the one side, in the light
of an intra-cultural analysis of the background of the Western identity of socio-
economic actors – bearing the morality and the theology of modern capitalism in
the management of their own money –, it can help advancing an original
understanding of money as connected to religious belief. On the other side, it can
shed light over the moral economy of non-Western model of development, such
as that of Islamic finance, whose legitimacy (as an alternative to conventional
capitalism) has been based, since its inception in the 1960-1970, on the religious
teachings of Islam.
In this regard, if in the last decades the promoters of Islamic finance have
proclaimed the possibility of another identity for the global economy as grounded
on the morality of Islam, to which extent does this otherness really subsist? Is it
(just) linked to Islamic teachings? And, in this sense, to which extent are Western
and Islamic finance different? How much can the latter contribute to a real change
to mainstream capitalism?
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In the persistence of reciprocal patterns of differentiation cultures (i.e. within
a differentiation construction that works bilaterally – the West vs. the East and, in
return, the Orient vs. the Occident – and opposes the secular modern West and its
capitalist system – whose a-religious roots have been anyway questioned from
Weber onwards – to the religious non-modern Orient ), the recognition of a deep
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interconnection between finance, economics, morality, and religion – as the
backbone of a functioning ‘kite’ in the form of ‘money’ – can represent a very
useful vehicle of conceptual analysis.
For instance, by ‘flying’ over this ‘money kite’ with regard to the interaction

in conceptualizing issues of legal pluralism and in sustaining the need for a stronger plurality-
consciousness for any scholar dealing today with global issues, both at a theoretical level and in
legal practice. As examples of this application, see MENSKI, Comparative law in a global context. The
legal systems of Asia and Africa, II ed., Cambridge, 2006; MENSKI, Law as a kite: managing legal pluralism
in the context of Islamic finance, in CATTELAN (ed.), Islamic finance in Europe: towards a plural financial
system, Cheltenham, UK - Northampton, MA, 2013, 15-31.
7 It is not the aim of this article to provide a comprehensive discussion of the story, mechanisms,
and instruments of the Islamic financial system, for which the reader can refer, for instance, to
AYUB, Understanding Islamic finance, Chichester, 2007; and WARDE, Islamic finance in the global
economy, Edinburgh, 2000. For an outline of the peculiar scientific paradigm of Islamic economics
and finance, CATTELAN, Theoretical development and shortages of contemporary Islamic economics studies:
research programmes and the paradigm of shared prosperity, IKAM Report n. 6, Research Paper n. 1,
Istanbul, 2018.
8 For further considerations on the point, please refer to section 5 of this article.
9 WEBER, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, New York, 1958 (first edition in German
language 1904-1905).
10 SAID, Orientalism. New York, 1978.

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