I've been reading on islamic banking recently, and I have to say that it appears one can arrive at a consistent philosophy and working economics with usury being prohibited. The world won't grind to a halt because capital is no longer entitled to gains by the virtue of purely existing, as opposed to being used productively. (Observe PoS vs PoW parallels, in the theme of this submission.)
You can lend money and earn a profit without interest, and you can pay for getting a credit without it being immoral. The trick is that both parties share both the gains and the risk, not just the lender being responsible for all the risk.
Note however, that this does not affect Islam one bit. True and honest scholars will always call out such actions, and they have been.
That being said, yes, at the core, true Islamic finance is about true and proper risk sharing, and reward sharing. Want to open a business? Get someone, or a group of people to fund you. They put in the money and you put in the risk. If it succeeds, you both share the rewards, if it doesn't, you lost the time and effort, and they lost the money. This is a very straight forward example.
Under Islamic law, lending money is only to be done as a purely charitable act, as the lender cannot benefit from the loan - either monetarily or in a non-tangential manner even. The general ruling is as follows: any loan that brings a benefit to the lender is Riba (can be loosely translated as usury). Riba involves more than the usury or interest that are done today by banks, it also includes things like buying gold on credit (Riba), or exchanging silver for silver of non equal amounts (also Riba).
In Islam, there is no difference. If I lend you $10,000 and I ask for $10,000.01 back, that $.01 is usury. They are equal because both operate on the same exploitation principle, that not only pries on the poor, but exacerbates the wealth inequality gap that everyone is complaining about today. Once the door is open to artificially differentiate the two, many other immoral things become acceptable. We've seen it time and time again.
We don't deny the time value of money, we jus say that use money in a moral way to extract value over time, by taking appropriate risk in a manner that is not exploitative.