Islamic Sustainability Accounting

Throughout history, man has tried to explain the intricate relationship between ethics, morale and rationality. For (non-exhaustive) example, Kant enunciated the supreme principle of morality as a standard of rationality (which he called "Categorical Imperative"), Nietzsche, on the other hand, was highly critical of morality, refusing the idea of the existence of one morality for all (such existence would be detrimental to the "higher man" according to Nietzsche).

It is probably not necessary to explicitly establish the role of religion in regulating this relationship, but what perhaps is more important is the consideration of the relationship between religion and culture.
What characterizes the religion of Islam specifically, and perhaps one of the most difficult things to comprehend for non-Muslims, is that it is not viewed as a subset of a wider cultural belief, as just "a religion", rather it is considered as a divinely ordained pattern for human conduct (although this is probably a conception shared by non-Muslim religious scholars).

Islamic law is a "system of prescriptions, recommendations and prohibitions rather than a specific legal code", and Muslims use this system to govern (in the Foucoultian understanding of governmentality) their selves.
Business organizations that operate in Islamic contexts are included in this consideration, due to the fact that legal separation of entities (although recognized under certain economic aspects) do does not preclude management to operate within the Islamic law system, and accounting is considered the mechanism through which organizations (and, in some instances, individuals alike) hold their accountability
towards God and other humans.

The aim of this research is to, first, understand accountability in Islam and its implications on accounting theory and practice; and, second, analyze the relationship between accounting from an Islamic perspective and what is defined as sustainability accounting.
The structure of this research is as follows: First, a literature review on the subjects of Islamic accounting research, and then on Islamic theoretical perspectives on social accounting.

In the second section, an introduction of the Kuhnian idea of paradigm, and then a discussion of the western-based secular economic paradigm and an argument over the necessity to introduce a new paradigm (i.e. paradigm shift) to regulate human economic behavior. In this part three cases will be discussed to showcase the failure of the western paradigm (namely self-interest paradigm) in explaining human (in this case corporate) misbehavior. Following, I will discuss the theoretical framework (arguably presented as the paradigm-shift) which will be considered throughout this thesis, suggested by the work of Haniffa and Hudaib (2011).

The third section will discuss accounting and accounting theory approaches: normative and deductive; and then, a discussion of the Islamic accounting theoretical approach in order to understand Islamic accounting theory and the precepts which it requires, as well as some practical aspects as a consequence of the adoption of Islamic accounting theory.

In the fourth section, with regards to sustainability accounting, I will discuss the major theoretical frameworks of social accounting, using a framework suggested by Gray et al. (2010), in an attempt to understand the relationship between western-based social accounting theories and Islamic social reporting theory.
Lastly, I will attempt to propose a framework of corporate report which would include financial and non-financial information, based on the work of Haniffa (2002) and Baydoun (2000; 2018).

This research does not try to find a comprehensive answer to the question of corporate (social) reporting. It is, rather, an attempt to present to the reader a (still) unexplored area of research, that of Islamic sustainability accounting. This research is but a call for scholars and researchers for further exploration in that area, which might present that aforementioned answer.