HALAL TRADING ROOM

A company is excluded outright if its core business involves alcohol, gambling, conventional (interest-based) banking/insurance, pork products, weapons/defense, adult entertainment, tobacco/nicotine, music or movie/film production, advertising, human/animal cloning, non-halal foods, marijuana, or other impermissible activities — regardless of its financial ratios. This screen runs first and overrides everything below it.

Companies that pass the activity screen are then checked against standard AAOIFI-style thresholds across three ratios, each measured against market cap or revenue as appropriate:

All three: lower is more compliant - "revenue purity" names what the ratio protects (how clean the revenue is), not a direction to maximize; the non-permissible share itself must stay below the threshold shown, same as the other two rows. Distinct from the per-stock "Purification Ratio" on symbol pages, which isn't a compliance test at all - see the glossary below.

Thresholds are set and computed by the screening provider (Halal Terminal, with a secondary provider as fallback), not this dashboard — we display their assessment, we don't compute it ourselves. A company just under a threshold is marked QUESTIONABLE rather than an outright pass.

Different accepted standards genuinely disagree on the exact numbers above — e.g. Mufti Taqi Usmani's published criteria use 33% thresholds measured against total assets rather than AAOIFI Standard 21's 30%-of-market-cap, plus two additional tests AAOIFI dropped in a later revision, and Dow Jones Islamic Market/S&P Shariah Indices/MSCI/FTSE Shariah each publish their own real thresholds and denominators (see the full breakdown below). A stock can be compliant under one accepted standard and not another. Our in-house research module checks all seven, plus the revenue-purity check they all require, combined with the activity screen into one verdict per methodology — visible as a research section on this page and on !halal in Discord — it's already found real companies where the verdicts diverge. Every methodology here is backed by a real, published, source-cited standard — we deliberately don't include any methodology whose exact formula we'd only be inferring.

Each row is a real, published standard — not a paraphrase. Every ratio here is numerator / denominator < threshold; lower always means more compliant.

^§ Why AAOIFI has no receivables row, when several other screeners show one. This is a researched conclusion, not an omission. AAOIFI's own Secretary-General (Dr. Hamed Merah, “Shari'ah Screening in the Islamic Capital Markets”, October 2017) sets out the market-cap two-ratio screen with no receivables test, and Standard 59 removed the earlier illiquid-assets test. We also found that one competing screener's own two properties contradict each other on this point — its API documentation states 49% of total assets while its own comparison article states 30% of market cap, “unique to AAOIFI”. Neither matches the higher-credibility primary source, so we adopted no receivables threshold for AAOIFI rather than pick one. Usmani likewise tests no receivables ratio; its net-liquid-assets test does that work instead.

^† Usmani is the only one of the seven whose own published source (Zamzam Capital's stated criteria) explicitly counts lease liabilities — finance and operating leases — as debt. We checked each other's own primary source directly: AAOIFI, MSCI, and FTSE are silent on lease treatment, and DJIM/S&P Shariah's real-world debt figure (per an independent academic reconstruction from filing data) is conventional interest-bearing debt only.

^‡ AAOIFI, DJIM, S&P Shariah, and MSCI count operating lease liabilities as debt too (finance leases are deliberately excluded — see why below), unlike Usmani's own explicit finance-and-operating treatment. Their own published sources don't explicitly require this the way Usmani's does — this is our own judgment call, made from real data rather than a citation: a full sweep of every symbol on the watchlist found that adding finance leases to debt flipped only 8 symbols from compliant to non-compliant across all four standards combined — too small to justify a change on its own — while adding operating leases flipped 77, concentrated in real-estate-heavy retailers, restaurant chains, and logistics companies (Target, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Darden, Yum! Brands, Lowe's — the kind of company that leases most of its stores rather than owning them). That's a real, economically sensible effect, not noise, so we made it a permanent part of these four calculations rather than treating it as optional per-lookup. It runs behind a simple on/off switch on our end (ENABLE_OPERATING_LEASE_DEBT, on by default) purely so we can turn it off instantly if that judgment ever needs revisiting — not something a visitor to this site can toggle. A concrete example: a company with $250M in conventional debt and a $1B market cap sits at 25% under AAOIFI's 30% line — compliant. Add a real $100M in operating lease liabilities (store leases, say) and it becomes $350M / $1B = 35% — over the line. Same company, same real balance sheet; whether operating leases count as debt is the difference between a pass and a fail. FTSE is not affected by this change — same reasoning gap as AAOIFI/DJIM/S&P Shariah/MSCI, just not in scope for this particular update.

MSCI publishes two series, and we run both: MSCI's own methodology document sets out the standard MSCI Islamic Index and the MSCI Islamic M-Series side by side in a single table. Same business-activity screen, same 33.33% debt and cash thresholds — but the M-Series measures them against the average of month-end market capitalization over the preceding 36 months rather than total assets, and allows a looser 49% on combined receivables+cash. It looks at first like a duplicate of S&P Shariah, since both use a 36-month averaged market cap — it isn't: S&P allows 49% on cash+securities where the M-Series allows only 33.33%, so a company holding cash between those two figures passes S&P and fails the M-Series on identical real numbers. Taken verbatim from MSCI's own published threshold table, not inferred.

FTSE vs. MSCI — the one that looks like a duplicate but isn't: both use the exact same total-assets denominator and the exact same 33.33% debt/cash thresholds, which made us initially treat FTSE as "just MSCI" — but FTSE's own official fatwa document states its combined receivables+cash ratio must stay under 50%, not MSCI's 33.33%. A company sitting at, say, 40% combined receivables+cash fails MSCI but passes FTSE on identical real numbers. Confirmed directly from FTSE Yasaar's own published methodology, not inferred.

What's genuinely similar: every standard tests the same two underlying questions (how much of the company is financed by interest-bearing debt, and how much of its balance sheet earns interest passively), all seven cap non-permissible income at <5% of revenue, and DJIM/S&P Shariah/AAOIFI all use market cap as their base (just current vs. 24- vs. 36-month averaged), while MSCI/FTSE both use total assets. What's genuinely different: the denominator (market cap vs. total assets), the averaging window (none / 24mo / 36mo), whether a third receivables ratio exists at all (Usmani/AAOIFI don't test it), how loose that receivables threshold is (33% to 50%), and — as above — whether lease liabilities count as debt.

Popular consumer halal-screening apps aren't a 6th, 7th, and 8th methodology — checked each one's own stated approach directly, and every one we found maps onto a standard already in the table above:

Musaffa is a real outlier: a 30% threshold (AAOIFI's number) applied to a multi-year averaged market cap (S&P/DJIM's style of denominator) — a hybrid Musaffa has never published an exact methodology document for. Amana Funds' own screen is real and well-known (a real 40-year mutual fund track record), but we could only find its exact numbers via secondary sources — Saturna Capital's own site didn't return usable content to us directly. We deliberately don't add either as a named standard above: presenting an inferred or unconfirmed formula next to six properly primary-sourced ones would overstate how well-founded it is. This gap is exactly why a borderline stock can come back "not halal" on Musaffa while showing compliant on Islamicly, S&P Shariah, FTSE, or our own engine — genuinely different thresholds on a similar-shaped ratio, not a data error on either side.

Each ratio above exists to answer one real question: is riba (interest) a meaningful part of how this company is actually financed and how it actually earns money? Almost no modern public company is 100% free of interest exposure somewhere in its balance sheet — a small cash reserve earning bank interest, a modest credit line — so the thresholds represent a real, scholar-set line between "incidental, tolerable exposure" and "interest is structurally part of the business."

Interest-bearing debt ratio — measures how much of the company is financed through interest-based borrowing rather than equity or interest-free financing. A company that runs mostly on interest-based loans is participating in riba through its own capital structure, even if the product it sells is entirely permissible.

Interest-bearing securities/cash ratio — the mirror image on the asset side: a company holding a large portion of its balance sheet in interest-bearing instruments (bonds, money-market funds, interest-earning deposits) is earning riba passively, regardless of what its core operations do.

Revenue/non-permissible income purity — even a genuinely halal-focused company can pick up a small amount of interest income incidentally (e.g. interest on an operating cash balance). Scholars generally don't disqualify a company outright for this if it stays below a small threshold — instead, the impermissible portion is meant to be "purified" (typically donated, not kept as personal gain). That's exactly what a stock's own Purification Ratio figure represents on this site — a real, calculated share of income you'd purify if holding the stock, not a verdict itself.

Riba — interest. The single most direct concern this whole screen exists to catch, on both the debt side (borrowing) and the asset side (holding interest-bearing instruments).

Gharar — excessive, avoidable uncertainty about what's actually being exchanged in a transaction. More relevant to how you trade (options, uncovered short-selling) than to a company's own verdict — see Is Day Trading Halal? and Is Options Trading Halal?.

Maysir — gambling, or a transaction so disconnected from real value that it resembles a bet. This is why the business-activity screen above excludes gambling/casino operators outright, and it's part of why highly speculative, no-underlying-utility crypto assets get flagged QUESTIONABLE — see Is Crypto Halal?.

Purification — donating the small, incidental impermissible portion of income (usually interest) a compliant company's shareholders receive, rather than treating the whole return as clean. Not something this site calculates or handles for you — the Purification Ratio shown on symbol pages is informational, sourced from the screening provider.

Screened separately via a hand-curated compliance list rather than the same automated provider pipeline — coins don't have the balance-sheet data the ratio screen above depends on. Coverage is intentionally narrower than the stock universe. See Is Crypto Halal? for the real scholarly reasoning behind each coin's status.

COMPLIANT / NON-COMPLIANT / QUESTIONABLE reflect the screening provider's most recent assessment, refreshed at most every 31 days — a symbol can drift between categories between refreshes as its financials change. Sector and country data (see Browse) come from a separate source (Finnhub company profiles) and are informational only — they don't affect the verdict. Full current status for every screened symbol is on the Compliance page. Screening a stock or coin doesn't address how you trade it — that is a separate question, asked one instrument at a time on the blog: stocks, day trading, forex, options, futures. When in doubt, consult a qualified scholar.