A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [251]
Perhaps surprisingly, religion is represented on our card itself. There is a decoration in the middle of it, a red fretwork, which looks like hollow stars, set in a rectangular strip. It is curiously reminiscent of an object we discussed earlier (Chapter 94): the Islamic patterning carved on the side of the Sudanese slit drum when it was taken to the Islamic north of Sudan, to proclaim the new world to which it belonged. Similar patterning makes the same point on our card, for this one is not just issued by HSBC but by HSBC Amanah, the Islamic banking wing of the corporation. This credit card is marketed as being compliant with Shariah law.
All Abrahamic religions have worried about the social evils of usury, lending at interest, that can all too easily result in the poor being driven into debt and eventual destitution. Both the Bible and the Qur’an have forthright things to say about usury, from the prohibitions of Leviticus – ‘Thou shalt not give him money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase’ – to the scathing words of the Qur’an: ‘Those that live on usury shall rise up before God like men whom Satan has demented by his touch.’
As a result, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all struggled with the ethics of advanced financial systems: the separation of money from goods, and cash from effort, and above all the social consequences of encouraging debt. The most recent manifestation of this millennial concern has been the rise of Shariah-compliant Islamic banking since the 1990s – Islamic banks now offer services consistent with Islamic religious belief and social behaviour in more than sixty countries. Razi Fakih, Deputy Global CEO of HSBC Amanah, explains:
Islamic finance is a very new industry. Conventional banking and finance has been around for as long as we all remember. Islamic finance started some time in the 1960s in Egypt, and I think it was only in the 1990s that it actually took off, so it’s just less than two decades old in that context.
This credit card is of course the result of the growing economic importance of the Middle East. But it is also a sign of something else, because this banking development runs counter to what, throughout the twentieth century, had become a received wisdom. Most intellectuals and economists from the French Revolution onwards – including Karl Marx – assumed that religion would steadily dwindle as a force in public life, that in the long run the forces of God would yield to the forces of Mammon. One of the striking facts of the first decade of the twenty-first century has been the return of religion to the centre of the political and economic stage in many parts of the world. Our gold credit card is a small but significant part of a growing global phenomenon.
100
Solar-powered Lamp and Charger
Manufactured in Shenzhen, Guandong, China
AD 2010
How should this history of the world end? What single object can possibly sum up the world in 2010, embody the concerns and aspirations of humanity, speak of universal experience and at the same time be of practical, material importance to a great many of us in the world now?
With hindsight, it will of course be self-evident. The Director of the British Museum in 2110 will, I am sure, have a very clear idea of what we should have acquired to keep the story up to date, and will smile – or sneer – at what we have in fact chosen. By then it will be obvious what major events or developments shaped the first decades of the twenty-first