Monetary moral guidance for interfaith financial dialogues

“There is a crisis of understanding that tears at the social fabric of societies around the world. Globalisation has outpaced understanding, creating divisions that plague societies with prejudice, misinformation, hate, and violence. The Coexist Foundation is a non-profit organisation creating understanding across divides. Since 2006, the Coexist Foundation has forged a range of inspiring initiatives to create understanding through education and innovation” (Coexist website).

Do we need to expand the “co-exist” conversation to include finance and food to better co-exist, as selected media rhetoric has been about linking it to extremism?

There are unsavoury casts of characters in all religions and ways of life, but they neither represent “man’s treatment of man” nor build bridges of respect with highway lanes of harmony. For Muslims, we must continually re-read the last sermon of Prophet Mohammad (saw), as it is the summary of the Muslim holy book, Quran, to continue to appreciate the Creator’s bounty called tribes of mankind.

Interest & values

To have meaningful dialogue, there needs to be an alignment of interest.

To build bridges, there must be common shared values.

To make it happen, there must be an initial conversation.

Imagine the following scenario:

There is a global finance conference on alternatives to conventional finance and investing in conservative Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, secular US or Australia or multi-ethnic Malaysia. There are seven speakers, and their respective presentations are from their areas of practice, including:

Hindu banking

Christian indexes

Buddhist asset management

Jewish hedge funds

Islamic finance

Ethical investing

Halal & kosher

At one level, it’s about financial interfaith dialogue, which is a good beginning in tearing down walls of differences and building bridges of common shared values. Thus, people have more things in common than differences, but unfortunately, even with the ubiquitous social media connectivity, very little dialogue.

Common trust

The common starting point for the faithful is “In God, we trust”.

Outright prohibitions are probably very few, as most areas linked to the real economy on financing, investing, and insuring are permissible amongst faith-based movements.

Common prohibitions may include:

Compounding interest, which had (and still has) resulted in many jurisdictions having “debtor’s jail”. For example, Albert Einstein was rumoured to have said “the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest”. It is assumed that people borrow because there is a need, be it for consumption (to buy houses, cars, hospitalisation, vacation, etc) or production (building products, factories, roads, etc), and to charge those (especially) in need (and pay a penalty) goes against human values/nature. But does faith-based financing recognise inflation and time value of money?

Areas that may not benefit (or harm) man, society, country and the environment are stated in the holy books, interpreted by scholarly interpretation and generally supported by modern day scientific studies. Thus, some areas may include weapons manufacturing (distinction between offensive and defensive?), alcohol (red wine benefit for heart versus liver problems and loss of “control”?), pornography (defined by US Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart who said “I know it, when I see it”), gambling (some say the stock and futures market is organised gambling, pointing to “flash crashes” associated with hyper-trading computer programmes), and so on.

It appears the rules of engagement on prohibitions are similar amongst faiths and secular, like ethical and atheist, movements. Thus, the prohibitions act as “uniters” amongst the various followers of the movements.

But is that enough to start the journey of convergence for understanding and appreciating each other?

Emerging & rebranding

There are a number of institutions offering Christian, Catholic and Lutheran-based investing and the assets under management are small, but the more important point is that it’s an emerging movement. Furthermore, the greed that sparked the financial crisis in 2008 and contributed to the Occupy Wall Street movement, has incidentally raised the profile for alternatives like “faith-based investing”.

Hypothetically, what if there were a grass-roots level movement for Hindu banking in India? But what is that? In 2008, Dow Jones Indexes launched the DJ Dharma Index, and its methodology was based upon Hindu, Jain and Buddhist principles, as interpreted by the advising respective scholars. Unfortunately, the index was decommissioned, but the principles are now known.

Islamic banking is a globally recognised phenomenon amongst faith-based movements, but is it time to raise the conversation bar on rebranding? Could the underlying principles and rules of engagement of Islamic banking, participatory finance, become part of universal banking?

Conclusion

Its well-known, though perhaps not accepted, that greed and love of money, and not money itself, is the root of all evil.

But money may also provide a compass for moral guidance. The monetary moral guidance is the common denominator of the faithful to have meaningful dialogues of mutual understanding over mistrust.

Financial coexistence may lay the foundation for human coexistence. – October 20, 2014.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.