Abstract:
The existing literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Islam shows that researchers
have tried to understand Islamic perspectives on CSR either by directly engaging with the sources
of Islam or from the practices of Muslims. The views of orthodox Islamic scholars have been
ignored even though many Western academics on Islam have argued that it is this group of
individuals that shape and represent the authoritative understandings of Islam on any particular
issue including CSR.
This thesis brings this ignorance to an end. In it, I conceptualize normative Islamic CSR from the
understandings of orthodox Islamic scholars using a qualitative research interview based
methodology approach of phenomenology that is used in CSR research (see Khan and Lund‐
Thomsen, 2011). The study’s phenomenological data was generated by conducting face to face
interviews with orthodox Islamic scholars (including several prominent ones) located in Pakistan.
Analysis of the above mentioned data leads to the study’s major contributions to the Islam and CSR
literature which are as follows: i. a comprehensive framework of Islamic CSR from the perspective
of orthodox Islamic scholars; ii. an Islamic CSR continuum to categorize organizations based on
their corporate social performance; iii. orthodox Islamic scholars’ views on the gap between Islamic
CSR theory and practices of Muslim businessmen; and iv. incompatibility between Islamic teachings
as understood by orthodox Islamic scholars and the ten principles of the UN Global Compact
relating to responsible business. All these contributions challenge the existing understandings on
Islam and CSR in Western academia and provide an additional alternative non‐Western perspective
in CSR research. In this way, the thesis enriches and extends the conversations of CSR and Islam in
Management and Organization Studies.
