Radical uncertainty, non-predictability, antifragility and risk-sharing Islamic finance

Under conditions of radical uncertainty, risk sharing renders financial systems antifragile. The goal in this introductory paper is to show that risk-sharing Islamic finance shares the characteristics of an antifragile system by mapping some characteristics of antifragility onto those of risk-sharing Islamic finance. We compare the benefits of a risk-sharing financial system to those of the dominant risk-transfer/risk-shifting conventional system of finance, basing ourselves on the criteria of antifragility. We focus on the argument that the antifragility principle of “skin-in-the-game” is equivalent to risk-sharing Islamic finance requirement of “no gain without risk.”