Comparative screening analysis
Where the five Shariah standards disagree about the same ETF
We ran 150 exchange-traded funds through all five recognised Shariah rulebooks. 35 came back with a direct contradiction — and the cause is measurable, not a matter of opinion.
1The finding
We screened 150 exchange-traded funds against five recognised Shariah standards. 35 of them — 23% — came back with a direct contradiction: at least one standard calls the fund permissible and at least one calls it impermissible, on the same basket, on the same day.
- 38 funds are permissible under at least one standard. That is the number most often quoted as “halal ETFs”, and it hides which standard did the permitting.
- Only 3 are permissible under all five. The gap between those two figures is the entire practical problem for anyone building a halal investing product.
- Doubtful is counted as neither side. A fund reading doubtful under one standard and permissible under another is a difference of confidence, not of answer. Folding the two together is how one screener reports 58 permissible funds and another reports 41.
2Five standards, three denominators
Every one of the five caps how much debt a company may carry, and the caps are similar. What differs is what the debt is divided by — and that is where the contradictions come from. There are only 3 answers among the five: 2 of the 3 divide by an average market capitalisation, a number that moves every day the market is open, and the third divides by total assets, which moves only when the company reports.
| Debt is divided by | Standards using it | Moves with the share price |
|---|---|---|
| 12-quarter average market capitalisationS&P publishes this as a "36-month average market value of equity" — the same window, said differently. These two move together. | AAOIFIS&P Shariah | Yes |
| 24-month average market capitalisationA shorter window, so the same price move reaches this standard at a different speed. | Dow Jones Islamic Market | Yes |
| Total assetsMoves when the company reports, never when the market does. | FTSE ShariahMSCI Islamic | No |
Read from the screening engine's own rules and measured across 11,164 screened companies per standard, 2026-11-04.
3A falling share price can make a company non-compliant
This is the consequence people get backwards, including us before we measured it. Market capitalisation is the denominator. A share price that rises makes it larger and the debt ratio smaller, pushing a company toward compliance. The failure case is the opposite.
A company whose share price falls far enough becomes non-compliant without issuing a dollar of new debt. Nothing about the business changed — the debt stayed the same size and the company shrank underneath it.
- It is slow, not sudden. The denominator is an average over several quarters, so a crash takes time to flow through. A one-day fall does not move a verdict.
- It splits the standards three ways. AAOIFI and S&P respond together, Dow Jones responds on its own clock, and FTSE and MSCI do not respond at all — so one price chart can produce three different answers about one company.
- Two of the four AAOIFI tests divide by market cap. Debt and liquidity do; the two income ratios divide by revenue plus interest, and those move only when the company reports.
4Ten funds the standards contradict each other on
Every row below is a real fund on this site, with every verdict as our engine published it. These are ordered by how many standards rule the fund out, so the widest disagreements are first.
| Fund | Akinda fund screen | Dow Jones Islamic Market | FTSE Shariah | MSCI Islamic | S&P Shariah |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TTAI | Not halal | Not halal | Not halal | Not halal | Halal |
| BPH | Not halal | Not halal | Halal | Halal | Not halal |
| IYW | Not halal | Halal | Not halal | Not halal | Halal |
| SHEH | Not halal | Not halal | Halal | Halal | Not halal |
| SOXQ | Not halal | Halal | Not halal | Not halal | Halal |
| XEG.TO | Not halal | Not halal | Halal | Halal | Not halal |
| XLK | Not halal | Halal | Not halal | Not halal | Halal |
| ARMH | Halal | Halal | Not halal | Not halal | Halal |
| BCTK | Doubtful | Halal | Not halal | Not halal | Halal |
| GXPT | Doubtful | Halal | Not halal | Not halal | Halal |
5A fund has no denominator of its own
Everything above describes how a company is screened. A fund is different: it has no business activity and no balance sheet of its own, so it is tested on the weights in its basket.
- Impermissible weight above 5% rules the fund out. That is a share of the basket, not a ratio over a balance-sheet quantity.
- Below 95% visible, the fund is not rated. The part we cannot see could change the answer, so no verdict is published rather than a weak one.
- So a fund's verdict never moves with its own market value. It moves when the verdicts of the companies inside it move, which is why one price change can shift a fund under three standards and leave it untouched under the other two.
6Why we publish all five rather than one
A product that shows one verdict has to pick a standard on the reader's behalf, and on 23% of funds that choice decides the answer. We apply 5 rulebooks to every instrument and publish each result beside the others, including where ours disagrees with an index provider's.
Every fund page on this site shows all five verdicts with the share of the basket we can actually see beside them, because a verdict without its coverage is not a complete statement about a fund. The disagreement is not noise in the data — it is the most useful thing in it.
Key observations
- 1Contradiction is the normal case, not the edge case. 35 of 150 funds are called permissible by one standard and impermissible by another.
- 2The cause is the denominator. Five standards use only 3 of them, and 2 respond to the share price.
- 3AAOIFI and S&P move together. They divide by the identical 12-quarter window, so they are not two independent opinions about leverage.
- 4A fund verdict is a weight test. It has no denominator of its own and never moves with the fund's own market value.
Data sources and method
- Fund verdicts:
- Akinda's own screening engine, snapshot of 150 published funds drawn from a universe of 3,668.
- Company screens:
- The same engine, applied per constituent under each of the five standards.
- Denominators:
- Read from the engine's own rules module and counted across 11,164 screened companies per standard on 2026-11-04.
How the figures were produced
- A contradiction requires one standard reading HALAL and another reading NOT HALAL on the same fund. DOUBTFUL counts as neither.
- A null verdict is never treated as a verdict: a fund no standard rated is not a fund every standard agreed on.
- Coverage is the share of a fund's weight we can match to a screened company; the 150 funds with a published figure are the basis for every coverage statement.
Limitations
- This is a snapshot. Verdicts move as providers republish baskets and as companies report, and a fund sitting close to a threshold can cross it on a single refetch.
- It covers the funds we publish pages for, not the whole screened universe, so the proportions describe this set rather than the market.
- We deliberately do not publish fund AUM, expense ratios or holding-level weights here. Those are part of the commercial API, and leaving them out is a choice rather than a gap in the data.
- No performance, return or risk figures appear anywhere in this report. We screen for compliance and do not measure investment outcomes, so any such comparison would be outside what this data can support.
Measured 2026-10-21. This is screening data presented for information. It is not investment advice, it is not a religious ruling, and the standards named in it are the work of their own scholars and boards.
Common questions
Why do Shariah standards disagree about the same fund?
Because they measure different things. Every standard caps a company's debt and its non-operating income, but they divide those by different denominators and set the thresholds at different levels. Three of the five divide by a market-capitalisation average and two divide by total assets, so a company can cross one line while sitting comfortably inside another — with nothing about the business having changed.
Which standard is correct?
That is not a question data answers. Each is the published work of its own scholars and board, and a reader follows one of them rather than an average of them. What we can do is apply all five to the same basket and show the results side by side, so the choice is visible instead of hidden inside a single blended verdict.
Can a company become non-compliant without changing anything?
Yes, and this is the counter-intuitive part. Because three of the five divide debt by an average market capitalisation, a company whose share price falls far enough becomes non-compliant without issuing a dollar of new debt — the debt stayed the same size and the company shrank underneath it. It is an average over several quarters, so this is a slow effect rather than a next-day one, and the two standards that use total assets do not move at all.
How is a fund screened differently from a company?
A company is screened on its own business activity and balance sheet. A fund has no business and no balance sheet of its own, so it is screened as a weighted roll-up of what it holds: each constituent is screened, then the impermissible weight is added up and tested against a limit. That means a fund verdict inherits every disagreement among its holdings, which is why contradictions are more visible at fund level than at company level.
Where can I see the five verdicts for a specific fund?
On that fund's own page. Every fund we publish shows all five verdicts together with how much of its basket we can see, because a verdict without its coverage is not a complete statement about a fund.
Keep reading
Basket coverage decides what a fund verdict is worth, and it drifts without anyone trading.
The funds marketed as Shariah-compliant, each against all five rulebooks rather than ours alone.
Which companies changed verdict, and whether it was the company that moved or the standard's own limit.
The filings behind every verdict, parsed and joined to the screen that used them.
Why five columns, not one
Every figure on this page comes out of the Akinda API — all five standards, for stocks and funds, with coverage beside each verdict.