The UN Global Compact and the Ulama (Religious Scholars of Islam): A Missing Voice in Islamic Business Ethics

Abstract

Islamic business ethics (IBE) has overlooked a major voice in Islam: the ulama (Islamic religious scholars). To enhance our understanding of Islam and business ethics we argue for this voice's inclusion. We demonstrate these contentions by presenting findings from a qualitative study in which we interviewed 50 ulama in respect of Islam's views on the UN Global Compact. While the current view in IBE research is that Islam and the UN Global Compact are compatible, our findings reveal that the ulama reject this argument. By including the voices of ulama in IBE research, novel and alternative perspectives on business ethics are realized. Our research illustrates the salience of perspectives exogenous to Western modernity as a means of enlivening ethical debate and—by implication—averting moral closure in business ethics and in the wider field of management and organization studies in which it is embedded.