Corporate social responsibility in Islamic financial institutions

• Autor(a) principal: Nogueira, João Pedro Mota Ferreira
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/7177
• topic: Responsabilidade social das empresas -- Corporate social responsibility; Islamic banking; Shari‘ah; Ethical identity; Banca islâmica; Identidade ética

The evolution of the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility has created a lot of debate in the modern world. In the financial world, the engagement in social responsible activities, such as, providing guidelines on sustainability, environmental impact reduction, donations to charitable causes or supporting communities have become a common practice for the vast majority of financial institutions. Islamic Financial Institutions, due to its religious bond, are bound to operate in a system that places social goals at the same level, or even above, of financial goals. Actually, the ethical system and values of Islam, alongside the Shari‘ah law, provide a natural framework of social responsibility for Islamic Financial Institutions. Besides the most common characteristics of Corporate Social Responsibility, there are some singular and unique to the Islamic Financial Institutions, for instance, the collection and distribution of Zakat, the establishment of Qard-Hassan and distribution policy (for social reasons) and the management of Waqf properties on behalf of clients. The unique characteristics of these institutions are present in their everyday activities with a strong focus of the prohibition of interest (riba), prohibited (haram) activities and avoidance of uncertainty/speculation (gahrar) and, on the other hand, the offer of products that are Shari‘ah compliant, notably, profit-andloss sharing arrangements. To understand if the literature concerning Islamic Corporate Social Responsibility matches the actual practices of Islamic Financial Institutions, a study of four published surveys, by renowned authors, was undertaken and the conclusions and implications for the future of Islamic Financial Institutions were drawn.