ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the sharing economy as a new ‘text’ for market relations whose meaning changes from the ‘language’ of conventional capitalism to that of Islamic economics, and more precisely, when parameters of scarcity, division and competition are replaced with assumptions of abundance of resources, distribution and cooperation among economic agents. In particular, (i) after denoting the ‘syntax’ embodied in this new ‘text’, the chapter argues that (ii) although they ‘say almost the same thing’ at a first glance, conventional and Islamic sharing economy enjoy alternative ‘semantics’, moving from a ‘mine’ versus ‘yours’ to a ‘mine’ beside ‘yours’ paradigm of shared prosperity. (iii) Accordingly, it proposes some guidelines to actualize the latter in the ‘pragmatics’ of Islamic social finance.
