Critical Muslim intellectuals’ thought: Possible contributions to the development of emancipatory accounting thought

This paper provides an overview of the intellectual debates of a number of Critical Muslim Intellectuals (CMIs) and explores their possible contributions to critical accounting research. The paper illustrates how CMIs’ thought based on postcolonial perspectives of cultural hybridity and second modernity can enrich and inform critical accounting research attempts to develop an emancipatory accounting project. This paper demonstrates that CMIs’ thought and methodology can contribute to challenging the domination of western/conventional accounting and its claims to objectivity, neutrality and universality. In particular, the paper highlights how CMIs’ enlightened approaches to hermeneutics; their emphasis on spirituality, ethics and liberation theology; their radical epistemological and methodological research and education agendas offer outward-looking alternatives to developing accounting thought.