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Previous studies have challenged the Human Development Index’s (HDI) ability to emulate the achievement of falāh (happiness). This paper aims to evaluate the role of religious values in establishing a positive link between the current measurement of development and falāh.

First, this study derives an improved value-loaded development measure from the concept of Maqasid al-Shari’ah (the higher objectives of Islamic law). Second, this paper compares the calculated Maqasid al-Shari’ah Index (MSI) with the HDI of some Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries by using the parametric pair difference z-test and t-test along with the non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Finally, the relationship of both indices and the proxy of falāh are examined by using the ordinary least square and the generalised method of moments estimations.

As far as the religious-led development is concerned, the HDI underestimates OIC countries’ development progress. Here, the MSI can better embody the attainment of falāh than the HDI.

This study only covers limited OIC countries due to the data availability issue.

The cultural-based development stemming from the religious values proves useful for putting the government effort towards the attainment of the objective of human well-being in the right direction.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study examining the empirical relationship between the MSI and falāh.

This paper aims to argue that the methodologies adopted by the conventional management accounting in selecting between or among two or more alternative courses of action, both in the long-term and the short-term decision making endeavours conflict with the overall objective ( falah) of Islamic enterprises.

The paper explores relevant literatures (including the Qur'an and the Hadeeth) to ascertain the objective of an Islamic enterprise and suggest an alternative approach, in making a choice among alternative courses of action, that aligns with the Islamic socio-economic objective ( falah).

The paper suggests that both in long-term and short-term decision making endeavours, cost-benefit comparison (where cost includes negative externalities) rather than discounted cashflow techniques or contribution margin should be adopted in making a final choice among alternatives to achieve falah.

The paper has not considered other objectives that may be pursued by an organisation beside profit maximization whether short-term or long-term.

The paper expands the frontiers of knowledge in Islamic accounting by exposing the inadequacy of the conventional management accounting decision making methods.

This paper explores the Islamic perspective of the conventional management accounting which is rare among scholars of accounting.

This paper aims to argue that the current environment in which the Islamic banking system is situated is not ideal for the system’s pursuance of its socioeconomic ideals, thus necessitating the system’s shift from pursuing falah to maximizing profits.

The paper theorizes and conceptualizes this shift from falah to profit maximization using two complementary theories – systems theory and institutional theory – to prove that such a shift is not unexpected. The paper further adopts a dialectical analysis that is somewhat historical to analyse the shift.

The measure of the Islamic banks’ performance in terms of their social ideals is misplaced, as the environment in which they currently operate does not support such goals. Thus, stemming from the theoretical base, the Islamic banks’ pursuance of profit maximization instead of falah should not be unexpected. The paper concludes that despite the unfavorable environment, the social ideals of the Islamic banking system may still be met, to an extent, through investment in microfinance and awqaf.

The paper adopts document analysis for sourcing data majorly from prior studies. Hence, the authors do not conclude that the analysis herein is applicable to all Islamic banks. Secondly, as the authors could not get a complete historical account of the Islamic banking system’s development, some aspects of the dialectical analysis – contradiction and change – have been discussed in a general fashion.

The need for Islamic banks in the current environment, especially for the Muslim population, cannot be over emphasized; however, the achievement of falah given this current environment may be daunting.

The current analyses of the shift of Islamic banks from pursuing falah to pursuing profit maximization are not well-defined, as they lack a proper theorization of the challenges faced by Islamic banks. This paper fills this gap.

This study aims to theoretically explore and examine the possibility of developing an Islamic social welfare function (ISWF) within the Islamic moral economy (IME) frame by going beyond the traditional fiqhī approach. It focuses on issues of preference ordering and utility through the normative dimension of Islamic ontology, as expressed and articulated within the IME.

Being a theoretical paper, a conceptual and critical discursive approach is used in this paper.

To establish an ISWF, a narrow juristic approach remains inadequate; there is a need to integrate the substantive morality to complement the juristic approach to achieve the ihsani process as the ultimate individual objective, which makes an ISWF possible. As the scattered debate on the topic concentrates mainly on the juristic approach, the main contribution of this study is to present a model in which juristic and moralist positions endogenized and augmented to constitute ISWF.

As there is a limited amount of research available on the subject matter, this paper will be an important theoretical contribution. In addition, this study develops an IME approach rather than fiqh-based approach used in the available research, which makes it novel.

Are men and women akin to single‐minded, “cold” calculators, each out to maximize his or her own well‐beings? Are humans able to figure out rationally the most efficient way to realize their goals? Is society mainly a market place, in which self‐serving individuals compete with one‐another‐at work in politics and in courtship enhancing the general welfare in the process? Assuming human beings see themselves both as members of a community and as self‐serving individuals, how are the lines drawn between the commitments to the commons and to one's self? we are now in the middle of a paradigmatic struggle. Challenged is the entrenched utilitarian, rationalistic — individualistic, neoclassical paradigm which is applied not merely to the economy but also, increasingly, to the full array of social relations, from crime to family. One main challenger is a social‐conservative paradigm that sees individuals as morally deficient and often irrational, hence requiring a strong authority to control their impulses, direct their endeavors, and maintain order (Etzioni, 1988).

In an Islamic environment, the behavior of the Muslim firm is different from that of the non‐Muslim. The Muslim firm ultimate objective is not only to maximize profit but also to enrich his love of hereafter and for achieving (falah) or success by sacrificing part of his profit for the benefit of the Muslim society (according to the degree of faith he possesses). This study aims to answer the following question: How does care for the good of the society influence the Muslim firm decisions? The answer to that question has been answered by formulating an objective function of the Muslim firm and deriving the optimally necessary conditions for maximization.

This study investigated the association between structural conditions and social incentives and their effect on the ethnic composition of mobile social networks. Regarding structural conditions, we examined the role of the ethnic group’s size, socioeconomic status, and heterogeneity of the city in which the business was located. Regarding social incentives, we investigated the social diversification hypothesis, which expects that residentially and socially segregated minority groups will take advantage of mobile communications to diversify their mobile communication ties with outgroup members.

Two data sets were used. The first was the aggregation of the mobile communication patterns of business customers as measured by one of Israel’s mobile phone operators in April 2010. The database included 9,099 call data records. The second was a data set of the social characteristics of 103 Israeli cities from the Israeli Bureau of Statistics. Both data sets were merged according to the place of residence of each customer.

Israeli Arab businesses in homogeneous Jewish and mixed cities operate in an environment with more structural opportunities to create outgroup ethnic ties than Arab businesses in homogeneous Arab cities. Jewish businesses in ethnically mixed cities have more outgroup mobile ties than comparable businesses in homogenous Jewish cities.

We expand previous models and suggest a structural diversification approach in which ethnic mobile social networks vary across homogeneous and ethnically mixed cities. These variations result in different social incentives as the diversification approach assumed, as well as different structural conditions, as the structural approach indicates.

Although the livestock sector is considered to be an important segment of the Saudi Arabian economy, its contribution, including the multiple sources of commercial income it provides, is underestimated. This industry provides thousands of jobs in various related sectors and meets national demand for food. This study aims to examine the impact of breeding inputs such as animal production, marketing processes and operation and legislation on livestock sector efficiency and strategic food security.

This study adopted an exploratory approach. The sample consisted of specialists in industrial production and livestock breeders in the northern region of Saudi Arabia. The relative importance index was used to analyze the data, which was evaluated using structural equation modeling in SPSS.

The results show the significant influence of breeding inputs, markets and legislation on increasing the efficiency of the livestock sector and the impact of livestock on strategic food security. They also highlight the need to motivate governments to focus on this sector, especially by reducing taxes on breeders’ income and lowering livestock costs accordingly. The Saudi Arabian Government should also facilitate innovative agreements to create global markets for the export of surplus livestock products. In addition, a marketing process is lacking in all areas of production and the local and international marketing of livestock products, which requires the support of different sources of fodder and establishment of markets for specific types of meat slaughter, packaging and sales.

This research was limited to the northern region of Saudi Arabia.

This study highlights the importance of marketing processes and activities according to marketing operations as they used in study instrument to explore their impact on in the marketing livestock sector for national food security strategies and guides future studies in this field.

This research recommends that decision-makers support marketing in the livestock sector and reduce production taxes.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no previous related research has been conducted in the field of food security.

The purpose of this paper is to present numerical experimentation of three constraint detection methods to explore their main features and drawbacks in infeasibility detection during the design process.

Three detection methods (deletion filter, additive method and elasticity method) are used to find the minimum intractable subsystem of constraints in conflict. These methods are tested with four enhanced NLP solvers (sequential quadratic program, multi-start sequential quadratic programing, global optimization solver and genetic algorithm method).

The additive filtering method with both the multistart sequential quadratic programming and the genetic algorithm solvers is the most efficient method in terms of computation time and accuracy of detecting infeasibility. Meanwhile, the elasticity method has the worst performance.

The research has been carried out for only inequality constraints and continuous design variables. This research work could be extended to develop computer-aided graphical user interface with the capability of including equality constraints and discrete variables.

These proposed methods have great potential for finding and guiding the designer to detect the infeasibility for ill-posed complex design problems.

The application of the proposed infeasibility detection methods with their four enhanced solvers on several mechanical design problems reduces the number of constraints to be checked from full set to a much smaller subset.

This study aims to analyse the role of zakat in poverty alleviation and income inequality reduction based on the gender of zakat recipients.

This study used the Centre of Islamic Economic and Business Studies (CIBEST) model as a poverty measure and the Gini coefficient and Atkinson index as income inequality measures to analyse 1,300 zakat recipients in five different areas of West Java, Indonesia.

Based on the CIBEST model, zakat distribution programmes have better salutary effects on male-headed households in terms of material (0.215) and absolute (0.037) poverty indices, whereas female-headed households have better performance on the falah (0.438) and spiritual (0.022) poverty indices, with greater changes in these indices in female-headed households. According to the Gini coefficient and Atkinson index, female-headed households have better income distribution one-year after zakat distribution programmes, whereas the male-headed households have better performance in regards to welfare loss.

The present study only used the poverty line standard published by the Central Board of Statistics from the Republic of Indonesia to identify respondents who live under the poverty line.

This paper can serve as a reference for zakat institutions in the implementation of zakat distribution programmes when the gender of zakat recipients is taken into consideration.

Not many studies have analysed the impact of gender in zakat distribution programmes despite gender being one of the most important determinants of poverty and income inequality. This study attempts to determine the economic impact of zakat from the perspective of gender.