Guest editorial: Islamic accounting, reporting and accountability between standards, governance, and stakeholder engagement

What the paper says

Islamic accounting sits in a curious double spotlight. On one hand, it is increasingly integrated into global markets, regulatory architectures and reporting infrastructures. On the other hand, it continues to make distinctive ethical and accountability claims grounded in Shariah-compliant practice and wider social purpose (Abras and Al Mahameed, 2023; Abras and Jayasinghe, 2023; Riaz et al., 2023). This interplay raises a significant question for accounting and reporting research:This special issue brings together eight papers that address that question from different angles: standard-setting and ideology; regulatory influence and transparency; risk governance and technology; religious ethics and audit oversight; capital market instruments and sustainability practices; customer perceptions of reputation and accountability; accountability measurement in Islamic non-government organisations; and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) adoption enablers in Islamic financial institutions. Across these studies, “accountability” is analysed as a comprehensive framework of arrangements, standards, disclosures, governance processes and evaluation tools, all of which encourage further research that aligns with critical examination and debate.The concept of “Islamic financial accounting, reporting, and accountability” is too broad (and therefore too vague) to be of practical use. In this issue, the emphasis is on accountability through reporting and associated governance infrastructures, including financial reporting standardisation, regulatory frameworks shaping transparency, risk governance and disclosure, audit quality and oversight and the extension of accountability demands into sustainability and ESG-related practices. This is visible in work on IFRS standardisation in Indonesian Islamic financial institutions (Mukhlisin and Hudaib, 2026), regulatory influence on transparent reporting (Jaradat and Oudat, 2026), risk governance and financial technology in GCC banking (Srairi, 2026) and audit quality linked to zakat and audit committee chair expertise (Ud Din and Nazneen, 2026). The issue also extends beyond “core” Islamic accounting into adjacent organisational settings where Islamic accountability claims and expectations are in play, such as sukuk-issuing listed firms (Rehman et al., 2026), customer adoption intentions toward “reputable and accountable” Islamic finance (Andespa et al., 2026), Islamic NGOs’ public accountability assessment (Faiz and Taib, 2026) and ESG adoption enablers in Islamic financial institutions (Khamisu et al., 2026).This special issue unpacks the intersection of Shariah principles and contemporary organisational administration, addressing the critical challenge of translating religious and ethical norms into measurable business practices. While we acknowledge the foundational importance of jurisprudence and theology, this issue is distinctly focused on the operationalisation and accountability framework. Consequently, contributions are anchored in the domains of governance, financial and non-financial reporting and stakeholder accountability. We engaged with research that assesses how organisations integrate Shariah concepts into tangible policies, and how the effectiveness of these efforts is communicated to and evaluated by users of information. By maintaining this clear boundary, the special issue provided actionable insights and theoretical advancements for scholars and practitioners in business administration, accounting and corporate governance.Research articles published in this special issue are cross-cutting and respond to ubiquitous public discourse and broader stakeholder concerns over how Islamic financial organisations pursue transparency, justice and accountability while operating within dominant reporting infrastructures. Mukhlisin and Hudaib (2026) examine how international financial reporting standardisation can embed neoliberal ideology into Indonesian infrastructural powers and shape the space for Shariah-oriented standard setting, based on interviews with standard-setting actors. The paper highlights how standardisation is not merely a technical matter: it can also serve as a channel through which particular logics are transmitted, consolidated and marginalise alternatives. This framing matters for how the field discusses “comparability” and “convergence” in Islamic accounting: the question is not only whether alignment occurs, but also which accountabilities it advances and which it potentially undermines.Several papers treat transparency as an outcome of governance arrangements rather than an inherent feature of Islamic accounting. Jaradat and Oudat (2026) suggest that Shariah compliance practices enhance transparency and that the regulatory environment plays a moderating role in shaping uniformity and standards across contexts. Srairi’s (2026) study in GCC banking (2013–2022; 58 banks) complicates this further by showing that governance arrangements may have counterintuitive performance associations, and that the effectiveness of risk governance depends on accompanying factors such as disclosure quality and FinTech development. These papers suggest that “good governance” cannot be assumed to be a universal template; it must be investigated as it is implemented, disclosed and interpreted. Further, its realisation is contingent upon specific context, effective Shariah compliance practices and the specific moderating influence of the institutional and regulatory environment.The study by Ud Din and Nazneen (2026) represents a crucial empirical shift in the discourse on Islamic accountability, moving from normative claims about religious ethics to a testable model of organisational integrity. A recurring assertion in this domain is that adherence to Shariah ethics should enhance corporate reporting integrity; however, this aspiration often remains abstract. Ud Din and Nazneen (2026) address this gap by reframing the compulsory payment of Zakat not merely as a religious duty, but as a quantifiable operationalised ethical mechanism that signals a firm’s commitment to broad societal accountability beyond legal minimums. The research establishes a testable linkage between a firm’s propensity to pay Zakat and superior audit quality, arguing that this underlying ethical culture fosters a corporate environment that prioritises amanah (trust), thereby reducing opportunistic behaviour. Crucially, the authors introduce a moderating variable, demonstrating that the positive effect of Zakat propensity on audit outcomes is significantly enhanced when coupled with the technical proficiency and vigilance of an expert audit committee chair. This interaction, in which a strong ethical signal is effective only when supported by robust technical oversight, provides a model that avoids ‘values talk,’ grounding ethical claims in measurable organisational behaviour and governance structures.A noticeable shift in the special issue is that Islamic accountability is treated as something that must be demonstrated in outcomes and impacts, rather than merely asserted through compliance language or formal Shariah structures. In this sense, sustainability becomes an accountability arena, as it forces questions about what is being measured, what is being disclosed and what stakeholders can reasonably infer about an organisation’s integrity and long-term orientation from its actions. Rehman et al. (2026) provide a capital-markets illustration of this shift by linking an explicitly Islamic instrument (sukuk issuance) to both corporate social sustainability and downside market risk. Working with Malaysian sukuk-issuing listed firms from 2011 to 2022, they model corporate social sustainability as a mediator and use a GMM approach, measuring crash risk via down-to-up volatility and corporate social sustainability using GRI-based components, while operationalising sukuk issuance through multiple dimensions (e.g. frequency, volume, ratings and tenure). The key point for this special issue is not simply the direction of the reported association, but what it reframes. Sukuk activity is discussed alongside sustainability practices and market fragility, positioning “Islamic” accounting as part of a wider accountability conversation about risk, transparency and organisational behaviour under uncertainty, not only a question of contractual form. Similar questions arise around accountants’ roles in broader sustainability transitions (Halari and Baric, 2023).Khamisu et al. (2026) approach sustainability from the perspective of organisational capability. Rather than assuming ESG adoption follows automatically from Islamic ethical commitments, they treat it as a problem of enabling conditions that must be assembled; they identify 11 enabling factors and structure their relationships through expert discussions and modelling, highlighting enablers such as responding to stakeholder sustainable development concerns, authoritative ESG legislation, sustainability training, strengthening stakeholders’ understanding of Islamic finance and alignment with sustainability frameworks for monitoring and evaluation (Khamisu et al., 2026; Halari and Baric, 2023). Read alongside the governance papers in the issue, this suggests a more falsifiable proposition that ESG in Islamic accounting is not a moral inevitability, but a governance-and-capability project whose success depends on regulation, internal capacity and the informational infrastructure used to define and assess good ESG performance.Faiz and Taib (2026) extend the sustainability/impact lens into a different organisational register by addressing accountability measurement for Islamic NGOs in Indonesia. Importantly, their starting point is that conventional accountability metrics do not travel cleanly across NGO types; accordingly, they develop a public accountability assessment model using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and a questionnaire-based approach, built around seven information attributes and a five-scale assessment system. Their application of the model prioritises donors as key users and identifies “understandable and accessible” information as the most important attribute (also highly valued by beneficiaries). The wider implications for the special issue are both conceptual and practical. Accountability here is defined less by compliance with an abstract reporting template and more by whether information is usable by those to whom the organisation claims responsibility, an explicit move towards stakeholder-facing, impact-sensitive accountability design.Finally, we highlight a deceptively simple point that accountability is not complete through disclosure alone; it is complete, if at all, when stakeholders recognise, interpret and act on what is disclosed. In other words, accountability is not only “produced” internally through governance structures and reporting routines; it is also granted (or withheld) externally through stakeholder judgment. In plural and minority-market settings, that judgement may centre as much on perceived accessibility and interpretive authority (e.g., scholars) as on the volume of disclosure itself (Riaz et al., 2017a, 2017b). This shifts the discussion from what organisations claim to do to how audiences decide whether to believe, value and respond to it. Andespa et al. (2026) push the field in this direction by treating reputable and accountable as existing partly in customers’ behavioural logics, not solely in institutional compliance architectures. By synthesising evidence from 89 studies through meta-analysis, structural equation modelling (MASEM) and a Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) framing, they show that adoption intention is shaped by the usual TPB engines, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and attitude, while also being meaningfully conditioned by religiosity, awareness and knowledge, with reputation and attitude operating as mediating channels. The special issue relevance here is how this reframes “accountability” as a perceived attribute with behavioural consequences: reputational credibility is not a cosmetic add-on; it becomes part of the mechanism through which accountability claims translate (or fail to translate) into stakeholder engagement. The finding that norms and perceived control matter also reminds us that accountability is socially distributed: what counts as trustworthy is negotiated within communities, shaped by social endorsement and the practical ease of using products, rather than merely by abstract ethical alignment.A further implication of this stakeholder-facing framing is that accountability is not only perceptive (what stakeholders can understand and verify) but also affective (what stakeholders feel, fear, hope for and become willing to endorse). In other words, trust is not simply produced by governance, disclosures and assurance; it is also shaped by the emotional and interpretive environments within which Islamic banking is encountered and judged. This matters because the field’s emphasis on reporting architectures can inadvertently underplay how Islamic finance is lived and assessed in everyday settings. Prior research has shown that perceptions of Islamic banking in the UK are heterogeneous and sometimes divergent, structured by perceived accessibility (Riaz et al., 2017b), empowerment potential and the mediating role of scholars in conferring credibility and resolving uncertainty (Riaz et al., 2017a). More recent work also reinforces that Islamic banking is not emotionally neutral. The industry’s contemporary dynamics can be interrogated through the lens of emotional propensities, with implications for how legitimacy is sustained, contested or withdrawn (Riaz et al., 2023). Alongside the papers in this issue that model behavioural intention, reputation and information usability, these studies support a stronger proposition that accountability is partly gained or lost in the social–emotional processes through which stakeholders interpret what Islamic means in practice, and whether the industry is experienced as accessible, intelligible and ethically consequential.For accountability claims to have effect, at least three conditions must be met. First, accounts must be intelligible and accessible: stakeholders must be able to understand what is being disclosed and what it signifies. Second, accounts must be credible: stakeholders must judge that the account is trustworthy, which Andespa et al. (2026) demonstrate is closely tied to reputation and attitude formation. Third, it must be meaningful to action: stakeholders must be able to translate information into decisions, adoption, support, continued engagement or withdrawal, conditioned by subjective norms and perceived behavioural control. This stakeholder-facing framing is useful because it prevents a common category error in Islamic accounting debates: assuming that accountability is secured once organisations can demonstrate compliance with Shariah governance or reporting templates. The studies here suggest a tougher standard. Accountability claims are mediated through social judgment, reputational considerations, user comprehension and practical feasibility. If those links are weak, accountability remains largely internal, “known” by the organisation and its regulators, but not necessarily recognised by the publics to whom Islamic accounting and Islamic NGOs often claim responsibility.Future research emerging from this special issue can be framed as a set of method-aware opportunities to tighten what we can claim about Islamic financial accounting, reporting and accountability. A first priority is to move beyond the binary of IFRS versus Islamic principles and instead study standards as they are enacted. The Indonesian standardisation study suggests that the most consequential dynamics often reside in the mundane work of translation: how reporting choices become normalised, how particular treatments are defended as technical necessities and how alternative framings are relegated to the realm of ethical aspirations with limited operational impact. That invites standards-in-use research designs that follow the life of a reporting requirement through standard-setting, implementation, internal policy, audit negotiation and user interpretation, with attention to the points where Shariah-oriented objectives are re-specified, narrowed or rendered invisible within IFRS-aligned infrastructures (Mukhlisin and Hudaib, 2026).A related but distinct agenda concerns the regulatory conditions under which Shariah compliance becomes transparent practice rather than formal symbolism. Jaradat and Oudat (2026) present a testable claim that Shariah compliance practices enhance transparency and that regulation moderates this relationship. However, its cross-sectional character leaves open questions about the endurance, sequencing and institutional change. Future work can address this by comparing regulatory designs across jurisdictions and over time, for example, examining how differences in enforcement capacity, supervisory architecture and regulatory clarity influence the reliability of Shariah governance signals and disclosure quality, as well as whether the same practices yield different transparency outcomes under weak versus strong oversight regimes. Methodologically, this suggests the use of longitudinal designs, cross-country comparisons and mixed methods approaches that pair institutional analysis of regulatory systems with observed reporting outcomes (Jaradat and Oudat, 2026). To this end, we require more comprehensive explanations of mechanisms rather than mere correlations, particularly when results are counterintuitive. Srairi (2026) reports a negative association between risk governance and bank performance in GCC banks, a result that is provocative because it challenges the common assumption that more governance is necessarily beneficial. Future research should therefore examine what “risk governance” is doing in practice, whether it compliance shifts risk disclosure or with FinTech infrastructures in that attention and within and designs are here to identify when and for whom risk governance to work bank or while other can how risk disclosure and including the between control and risk Din and Nazneen (2026) open a further that can the evidence on ethics and by treating religious as organisational signals rather than normative The is both and matters because the zakat quality (and its with audit committee chair may on institutional context, enforcement environments and how zakat practices are operationalised and disclosed. matters because we zakat propensity oversight, influence or reputational that work with audit committee internal audit and Shariah governance make these while can conditions across and jurisdictions (Ud Din and Nazneen, 2026). a stakeholder a research may to the practical application of provides a of norms, perceived religiosity, and mediating through reputation and however, it by us which disclosures or shift and behaviour in specific contexts. and field designs can this by the influence of different accountability (e.g. the and of Shariah governance disclosures, the and of versus reporting or reputational on perceived legitimacy and adoption or engagement. designs can also examine whether signals work for different customer of or of on social norms (Andespa et al., 2026).A research concerns the conditions of and engagement through which accountability claims become socially in particularly in settings where Islamic banking is alongside The special issue and the wider encourage us to treat accessibility not as a but as an accountability can use Islamic financial products, under what informational and practical and with what interpretive on perceptions of Islamic banking in the UK a of what Islamic banking the of its empowerment potential and the credibility of work in shaping legitimacy and resolving interpretive (Riaz et al., 2017b). Future work can on this by examining how accessibility is language and and how it with disclosure and regulatory architectures to shape perceived Islamic accounting and accountability research from as part of mechanism rather than treating it as around Riaz et al. scholars to study Islamic banking through the lens of critical and emotional propensities, questions that closely with the of this special do reporting and governance arrangements when do they and how are emotional by reputational and lived of or Methodologically, this suggests designs that can in and of customer and discourse analysis of reputational claims and in and whether specific accountability of Shariah governance disclosures and reporting perceived accessibility and to across stakeholder on Islamic NGO accountability, and (2026) assessment model clear that accountability is not only a corporate or regulatory matter but also a problem in plural stakeholder where information attributes and user shape what accountable” can in That of research is and that whether the public accountability assessment model for Islamic NGOs that is built using the Hierarchy Process (AHP) in and Taib (2026) and its across NGO and of and whether stakeholder shift under different structures or governance The other is how “understandable and accessible” reporting can be operationalised accountability to or informational in that the organisation’s public This suggests a role for and where reporting are and evaluated in with NGOs and stakeholder rather than being assessed at a (Faiz and Taib, 2026). et al. (2026) provide a structured account of what should ESG adoption, but it also highlights the gap between and Future research can therefore shift from enablers to whether they in ESG reporting quality, ESG performance or governance within Islamic financial and whether these on regulation, stakeholder or the of internal such as and monitoring designs are in this context, as ESG adoption is a and comparisons can also between what is and what is by and market Importantly, work should to the of where visible ESG infrastructures in practice, because Islamic finance often under legitimacy expectations (Khamisu et al., to acknowledge the institutional support for the development of this special This the organisation and of a special by the of of and The support in enabling travel to the