Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in Western and Islamic finance

Credere (‘to believe’, ‘to trust’ in the Latin language) defines the essence both of money and religion. If trusting someone means giving them personal/economic credit, believing in God involves faith in afterlife salvation. Both these relations reflect the trust that what has been lent will be returned; what has been righteously invested will be multiplied. Moreover, just as any story of credit is a story of risk and uncertainty (debtors may not be able to return money, and credit institutions are always, after all, risk managers), any story of faith is a story of hope in redemption and grace, which clearly goes beyond human control – hence, uncertainty here reappears again. The originality of this article lies in the understanding of money as connected to religious belief. For this purpose, it takes a comparative perspective on the notion of trust (credere) in Western and Islamic finance, and how this differently shapes the interaction between money (credit) and religion (faith) in their moral economics. Moving from the relationship between credere (‘to trust’) and credit that interconnects finance, economics, morality, and religion as if they were the corners of a ‘money kite’ (section 1), the article delves into the theological backgrounds of Western and Islamic finance, so to interpret their alternative models of credit and risk management (interest-based capitalism vs risk-sharing, mutuality, and cooperation) as specific manifestations of their respective religious creeds, also in relation to the nature of socially oriented investments (sections 2, 3 and 4). To conclude the discussion, final considerations are proposed on the relationship between trust, money, and religion according to Weber’s interpretive outline of capitalism and in Islamic finance conceptualisation, and how they testify to the persistence of a differentiation culture of modernity (section 5).