Page 9 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

IANUS n. 29-2024 ISSN 1974-9805

Elaborating on the matter, in this article I will try to compare the moral
economy of Western/conventional and Islamic finance by considering how the
kite corner of ‘religion’ affects the corner of ‘finance’ in managing money in
connection to the centrality of trust as founding element of any functioning
economic community.
More precisely, the investigation will lead to refer to some religious
assumptions that lies behind conventional and Islamic finance, so to compare the
extent to which credere (‘to believe’, ‘to trust’) in different faiths (respectively,
Christianity and Islam) – within a relation man-God projecting human life in the
eternity – also affects the practice of credit management – as a worldly relation
between persons that trust each other (section 2 of this article). Correspondingly,
keeping the interaction between religion and finance as background for the
’money kite’, this reflection will be linked to aspects of creed in the comparative
investigation of the theological backgrounds of Western and Islamic finance
regarding issues of risk-sharing (section 3) and social finance (section 4).
To reach this purpose, the central pair of the list from which this paragraph
has started (economy + morality, i.e. the concept of moral economy «trivialized
through its faddish application to almost everything»: see previously), will be left
preliminarily apart in the discussion. In any way, its consideration will be
functional to look at risk and credit management
- through the lenses of the differentiation culture regarding religion and
finance between the West and the East (section 5),
- after critically evaluating if a social impact of Islamic finance automatically
exists or not (section 4),
- within the conceptualization of the other and the brother in economic affairs
(section 3)
- and how money operates in financial systems (either ‘occidental’ or
‘oriental’) according to a sociology of ‘society’ or ‘community’ of economic
interests (section 2) that deeply relates to the notion of credere (‘trust’) both
in a worldly and in a theological perspective.
In other terms, what we are going to do is navigating concentric spheres of
meaning as if the corners of our ‘money kite’ would overlap in the barycentre (for
a graphical representation of this approach see next page),

in Western and Islamic scholarship; it is well-accepted by Muslim believers, as it emphasizes the
moral superiority of Islam; it is useful for Islamic financial institutions, which can enjoy a ‘moral
reputation’ advantage over their ‘secular’ competitors. Moreover, the description can be
comfortably justified by the assertion that ‘faith and conscience have always been influential
amongst factors encouraging to invest ethically’»: CATTELAN, Islamic finance and ethical investments.
Some points of reconsideration, in KHAN - PORZIO (eds.), Islamic banking and finance in the European
Union. A challenge, Cheltenham, UK - Northampton, MA, 2010, 77. See also CATTELAN, Shari‘ah
economics as autonomous paradigm: theoretical approach and operative outcomes, in Journal of Islamic
Perspective on Science, Technology and Society, 1 (1), 2013, 3-11; CATTELAN, Legal pluralism, property
rights and the paradigm of Islamic economics, in JKAU: Islamic Economics, 30 (1), 2017, 21-36;
CATTELAN, L’economia islamica: alternativa apparente o reale?, in Oriente Moderno, 97(2), 2017, 270-290.

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