Shariah Governance and Cooperative Business Sustainability: A Systematic Literature Review (2016–2026)

Islamic cooperatives combine member ownership with obligations to uphold justice, transparency, and mutual assistance. Yet evidence on how Shariah governance supports their sustainability remains dispersed across finance, management, and cooperative studies. This systematic review critically examines governance arrangements, the organizational processes connecting them to sustainability, and the conditions under which these relationships operate. The source manuscript reports a systematic search across Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, and Google Scholar and a final sample of 44 studies within a review scope of 2016–2026. A narrative thematic synthesis organizes the evidence into governance structures, sustainability and member welfare, compliance and risk management, and digital transformation and financial literacy. The studies suggest that supervisory bodies contribute through their interaction with managerial competence, member participation, internal controls, and knowledge management. Reported benefits include savings mobilization, member satisfaction, compliance readiness, and operational efficiency, although heterogeneous designs and measures limit causal interpretation. Environmental outcomes receive less direct attention. We develop an interpretive framework in which formal oversight, shared ethical commitments, and organizational capabilities jointly support cooperative sustainability. Its proposed pathways require further testing through longitudinal and comparative research. The reported search chronology and publication counts require reconciliation before the review can be considered fully reproducible.