The Typewritten Market: Shari’ah-Compliance and Securitisation in the Law of Islamic Finance

Arab Law Quarterly, Forthcoming

Posted: 30 Sep 2022

Date Written: 2021

Abstract

By taking inspiration from Wisława Szymborska’s poetry and Brinkley Messick’s scholarship, this article interprets the law of Islamic finance as evidence of a radical shift in the social anthropology of Islamic law from classical to contemporary times. To this aim it highlights the changes from fiqh in medieval trade (where individual actions were judged according to rules legitimised by their own local context) to the current process of Shariʿah-compliance, arguing that this process belongs to a textual polity where standardised certificates, contracts and securities have replaced actual social relations in the global financial market. In the light of this, the article advances the notion of Typewritten Market to depict the nature of Islamic finance as a socio-economic space embodying a ‘de-materialised Šarīʿah’: that is to say, a meaning of Islamic law whose contemporary time belongs more to legal/financial technology rather than to Muslim human action.

Keywords: Islamic finance; Shariʿah-compliance; Islamic law; anthropology; Šarīʿah; fiqh

Suggested Citation

Cattelan, Valentino, The Typewritten Market: Shari’ah-Compliance and Securitisation in the Law of Islamic Finance (2021). Arab Law Quarterly, Forthcoming , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4199237

Valentino Cattelan (Contact Author)

Birmingham City University ( email )

Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences
The Curzon Building
Birmingham, West Midlands
United Kingdom

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Abstract Views
144
PlumX Metrics