This article argues that Islamic management and organization knowledge (MOK) is relatively under- and mis-represented in the literature. This conclusion is reached following a detailed literature survey and analysis which also examines some of the core representational practices used to account for Islam in the literature: the persistence of essentialism and orientalism; the disposition to refract instances of Islamic MOK through Northern lenses; and the tendency for some Southern scholars and institutions to become intellectually captive to the North’s knowledge system. We discuss this in the context of a politics of knowledge that bears on knowledge production and dissemination processes in MOK. This reveals continued intellectual and cultural imperialism, sustained Western hegemony, and the exclusionary practices of the North’s associated discourses and institutional frameworks that valorise and elevate Northern epistemology, theory and method, but devalues and marginalize alternatives. We argue that any neglect of Islam is unwarranted given (a) its global significance on a range of dimensions, (b) the particularities of its relations to the North—characterized by orientalism and Islamophobia and (c) the presence of a distinctive Islamic worldview, epistemology and ethics that informs practical action, including management and organization. This entails that an Islamic MOK offers prospects of an alternative or complement to the North’s orthodox perspective and is deserving of a proper voice in the literature. We conclude by offering practical suggestions for change.

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Purpose Islam plays a powerful symbolic and cultural role in the constitution of consumer preferences, especially in Muslim countries. To quantitatively study this role in the consumption patterns of Muslim consumers we need a suitable scale for religiosity. However, the existing scales of religiosity have been developed primarily for Christian/Jewish respondents and cannot provide valid results for Muslim consumers. This study aims to address these challenges by re-conceptualizing the religiosity construct for Muslims and conducting an exploratory study to generate an initial scale. Design/methodology/approach This paper initialized the scale development exercise with a systematic review of the existing Islamic literature to ensure that we use Islamic categories to build the scale. Once the authors had a large pool of items, they consulted experts on Shariah (Islamic law) to evaluate these items for clarity, face and content validity. Next, they conducted five focus groups to (a) determine if they had covered the full terrain of Muslim religiosity; (b) identify if the items correspond with the actual experiences of the target respondents; and (c) ensure linguistic compatibility. This was followed by administering an exploratory survey designed to test psychometric properties of the new scale and to analyze the underlying dimensionality of the inventory of items. Findings To extract a manageable number of latent dimensions in the survey data, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) procedure was conducted. This resulted in the extraction of five different factors which were named as Mu’amalat_societal ethics, Roshan Khayali (enlightened moderation), Ibadaat (prayers), Mu’amalat_societal laws, Azeemat (a state exhibiting scrupulous faithfulness) and Mu’amalat_business dealings. There is a divide between Ibadaat (individual and collective worship) and Muamlaat (social relations) that emerged in the data from the cluster analysis procedure. Originality/value Religion can be an important part of decision-making of a typical consumer. This paper proposes a new scale for Muslims to tap into their religiosity, as existing scales are not embedded in the Islamic literature. This study also distinguishes Muslim religiosity from its Western counterpart and thus helps in clarifying the Muslim religiosity construct.

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