<![CDATA[Productive zakat programs often judge mustahik business progress through income change or a terminal beneficiary status. These indicators provide limited guidance when enterprises follow heterogeneous trajectories or lose earlier gains after household and market shocks. This conceptual article develops the Mustahik Business Graduation Model (MGUM), a decision architecture that connects monitoring evidence with differentiated treatment, reassessment, and financing transition. Theory-driven conceptual development was used to identify the decision problem, select a functional knowledge base, synthesize theoretical mechanisms, derive conceptual requirements, construct the model, and formulate propositions. Sustainable livelihoods explains vulnerability and path dependence; dynamic capabilities clarifies how mustahik and zakat institutions convert resources and information into routines; the graduation approach informs milestones, coaching, and reassessment; and credit-guarantee principles establish additionality and institutional authority. MGUM organizes decisions through basic business capability, reversible development positions J1-J3, and an OPZ support assessment that precedes independent financing appraisal. Its central contribution is to make monitoring consequential: evidence informs a provisional position, the position narrows the treatment choice, and subsequent evidence can revise the decision. Five propositions identify the mechanisms and conditions to be examined through content assessment, inter-rater testing, longitudinal piloting, and comparative evaluation.]]>
