Nurtured by 'kufr': the Western philosophical assumptions underlying conventional (Anglo-American) accounting

Conventional Accounting parades itself as an objective, value-free technical discipline which provides information to shareholders and creditors to enable them to make informed decisions. This is supposed to result in efficient allocation of resources in the economy leading to social welfare (AAA, 1975). Any infusion of normative values (such as Islamic religious values) is thus taken as unwarranted interference of a metaphysical discipline in the realm of social science, which we are told can only make accounting biased and unscientific (Watts & Zimmerman, 1986). The critical and social accounting literature (e.g. Gray et al., 1996; Tinker, 1985) confronts this posture and seeks to introduce some 'subjectivity' and humanity into accounting by recognizing its ill effects on society and the environment. However, these two schools themselves being based on the Western secularist paradigm cannot address the root problems of accounting, especially from the Islamic paradigmatic perspective.