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Introduction
Ethical behavior in corporate world is a growing trend across the world and many companies now use different social programs as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR activities may benefit companies in the long run to achieve sustainable revenue growth by increasing customer loyalty. This is because consumers are usually influenced by the social initiatives of firms if they perceive that firms are socially responsible to their stakeholders (Crowther, 2003; Sen and Bhattarchariya, 2001). CSR has become an important topic in both academic literature and business world in the past two decades (Fatma and Rahman, 2016; Rahman and Norman, 2016). CSR positively influences firm’s financial performance (Weinzimmer and Esken, 2016) and provides competitive advantage to firms (Diddi and Niehm, 2016). However, evidence shows that CSR impact on consumer behavior is subject to economic and cultural variables (Becker-Olsen et al., 2011). Therefore, CSR activities cannot be generalized to have a positive effect on the consumers’ buying behavior, particularly their purchase intention. CSR effect on consumer purchase intention is well studied in the developed countries, yet it is largely unexplored in developing countries where CSR programs face enormous challenges because of the diversity in social, ethnic and religious issues in their population (Visser, 2008). It has also been suggested that constructs developed in western countries should be tested in non-western regions (Kolk et al., 2015). In addition, CSR might be reaching maturity, but consumer response to CSR activities is an under-researched area (Feldman and Vasquez-Parraga, 2013).
The association of CSR with religion is a relatively recent research phenomenon and the studies examining this relationship fall in three categories. First, there are conceptual studies that present arugments to highlight how different religions of the world – Christanity, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam promote ethical business practices either openly or by implication (Kim et al., 2009; Williams and Zinkin, 2010; Muniapan and Satpathy, 2013; Khurshid et al., 2014). Second, the impact of manager’s religiosity, in general and religious affiliation in particular – Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, on firms’ CSR orientation has been examined by a number of researchers (Ibrahim et al., 2008; Darrag and E-Bassiouny; Du et al., 2014; Bassiouny et al., 2015; Cui et al., 2015; Verma...