Our Testimonials

When the Quaid-i-Azam University first asked if I would be an outsider reviewer of the PhD thesis version of this book, I thought, why not? The topic was interesting and the approach was empirical. That the research was done by a young Pakistani PhD candidate in Kashmir made it all the more intriguing. There are disadvantages to working outside the major universities of the world but there is also an opportunity to think things through independently and creatively. I was impressed with the painstaking effort to conduct an original survey on households in Pakistan to test propositions about how religiosity affected behavior at a time when there was relatively little analysis of the issues in economics and when studies used limited questions (how many times one attends religious services, belief in an Almighty) from standard surveys rather than developing new data.
The book provides a more general analysis for interpreting consumer behavior in the context of religion from an Islamic perspective. It is a highly creative and original effort to link behavior, traditional micro-economic theory, and the insights and wisdom of the Qur’an into a unified vision of economic life. The survey data analyzed in chapter 6 derives from novel questions about religious attitudes and behavior in the survey that first attracted my attention, applied to examine charitable behavior and voluntary work. This is a valuable contribution to the on-going scientific effort to analyze the role of religiosity in our lives. It is part of the modern trend in economics to explore aspects of human beings that goes beyond the caricature of economic man as solely concerned with narrow personal interest while recognizing the truths of economic responses to incentives. I was happy to read the original thesis and am pleased to see the work appear as a published book.