ABSTRACT
This chapter explores altruism since it is central to Akhuwat's modus operandi on the fund-raising and lending sides of its microcredit operations. It describes the conceptual frameworks drawn from the economics literature that pertain to faith-inspired giving. The chapter identifies some practical issues of giving in Islam that emerge from the conceptual discussions and finally work towards a working definition of altruism that we refer back to in the empirical Chapters and use it to evaluate Akhuwat's work. A prominent conceptual approach in mainstream economics pertaining to faith-inspired giving includes utilitarianism that Becker extended to altruism within the family. Altruism is not defined philosophically but rather in behavioral terms as interdependent utility functions. Proper theorizing would require a utility function to emerge from modeling the dynamics of social interactions, and human codes of conduct or rules implicit in them, with altruism resulting as a prediction from such functions.
