Hujja — Open-Source Rules-as-Code Shariah Stock Screening Engine

Name. Hujja (حجة — "proof, evidence"): in Islamic legal reasoning, the probative argument that establishes a claim. That is precisely what this engine is built to produce. PyPI and GitHub namespaces verified free on 29 July 2026; trademark clearance in MENA jurisdictions is still pending.

Hujja screens stocks for Shariah compliance using auditable, versioned rules — and returns one verdict per standard, never a merged black-box answer.

License: Apache-2.0 · PyPI: planned · MCP server: planned · Status: pre-alpha

This is not a fatwa and this is not investment advice. Hujja is an informational and educational tool. Its verdicts are mechanical applications of published screening methodologies to public financial data. They are not religious rulings, and they are not recommendations to buy, sell, or hold any security. Always consult a qualified Shariah scholar and a licensed financial professional. See the full Disclaimer.

Status: pre-alpha (design phase). No code has been published yet. This README is the public contract that the first release will honor.

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Why this exists

Every serious halal stock screener today — Zoya, Musaffa, Islamicly, Finispia, Halal Terminal, IdealRatings — is closed-source. You receive a verdict; you cannot audit the threshold, the denominator, the averaging window, or the data snapshot behind it. As of July 2026, we found no public project that encodes the major Shariah screening standards as auditable open-source logic (surveyed: the GitHub islamic-finance topic, PyPI, and the official MCP registry).

That opacity hides something specific: the same company can be compliant under one standard and non-compliant under another. Thresholds differ, denominators differ (market capitalization vs. total assets), averaging windows differ, sector lists differ. A single merged verdict silently picks a winner for you.

So Hujja's first published dataset will be a divergence matrix: for a broad US index, every company's verdict under every encoded standard, side by side, as open data. We have not computed it yet and we will not quote a headline number before we have — the matrix will report it.

The engine is built on five commitments:

1. Rules as code, versioned. Every rule lives in a declarative file carrying its threshold, numerator, denominator, averaging window, the version and date of the methodology it was taken from, and the URL of the official source document.
2. One verdict per standard. Hujja reports each standard's verdict side by side and never merges them. The divergence is the information.
3. Reproducible. verdict = f(rules manifest, facts snapshot). Same rule versions + same financial facts = same verdict, every time, with a structured evidence trail citing the exact rule applied.
4. Public data only. The engine and any published verdicts are computed exclusively from public sources (SEC EDGAR / XBRL). No licensed market data is redistributed in this repository.
5. Human-in-the-loop. Ambiguous cases (mixed activities, unclear revenue segments) return DOUBTFUL and are flagged for expert review — never silently auto-resolved.

Supported standards

v0 scope — verified against current official sources

Standard	Financial screens (paraphrased summary)	Denominator / window	Source (official)
AAOIFI Shariʿah Standard No. 21 (as amended by SS 59)	Interest-bearing debt ≤ 30%; interest-bearing deposits/investments ≤ 30%; non-compliant income < 5% of total income; core business activity must be permissible. The former liquidity screen was removed by Standard No. 59.	Market capitalization	AAOIFI e-standards
Dow Jones Islamic Market — DJIM (S&P DJI)	Sector screens (alcohol; tobacco & e-cigarettes; recreational cannabis; pork-related; conventional financial services; non-defense weapons incl. spyware; gambling; adult entertainment) with a 5% tolerance where non-permissible revenue includes all interest income. Single accounting screen: total interest-bearing debt / trailing 24-month average market capitalization < 33%.	24-month average market capitalization	S&P DJI — DJIM Methodology, Feb 2026

Two facts many screeners still get wrong (verified in the February 2026 S&P DJI document):

• DJIM's old "three ratios < 33%" description is obsolete. The accounts-receivable screen was removed effective March 2023, and the cash + interest-bearing-securities screen effective September 2023. A single Leverage Compliance filter remains.
• DJIM applies a transition buffer: a stock crossing the 33% line keeps its previous status if the ratio stays within 2 percentage points of the limit, and only flips after 3 consecutive evaluation periods (immediately if beyond the buffer). Faithful index replication therefore requires state. Hujja's DJIM rule file exposes both a stateless point-in-time test and this stateful index-replication mode, explicitly and separately.

Roadmap standards — encoded only after verifying the current official version

Several index providers publish two families under one brand name, with different denominators. Conflating them is the most common error in secondary sources, so Hujja encodes each family as a separate standard with its own rule file:

Family	Denominator	Note
FTSE IdealRatings Islamic Index Series	12-month average market capitalization (debt ≤ 30%)	Ground rules
FTSE Shariah (Yasaar-screened)	Total assets (33.33%)	Distinct family — never merge with the above
MSCI Islamic Index Series	Total assets	MSCI: "Uses total assets as denominator"
MSCI Islamic Index M Series	Average market capitalization	MSCI: "Uses average market capitalization as denominator"

Both MSCI families share the business-activity screen but differ on the financial ratios; MSCI describes them as offered together "to accommodate client preferences" (MSCI Islamic Indexes · latest methodology). Exact ratio values and thresholds are to be read from the current methodology document before encoding.

SC Malaysia (Shariah Advisory Council) — two-tier activity benchmarks (5% / 20%); cash/total assets and debt/total assets each < 33%; plus a qualitative screen. The SAC's official semi-annual list (effective the last Friday of May and November; the November 2025 list took effect 28 Nov 2025, with 859 of 1,073 securities ≈ 80% classified compliant) doubles as Hujja's external validation benchmark — no competitor publishes such a check. Official page.

Each rule file records the exact methodology version and date it encodes. When a standard changes, the rule file is versioned — old verdicts remain reproducible against old rules.

How a verdict is produced

normalized financial facts (SEC EDGAR / XBRL)
        │
        ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│  rules engine               │  ← declarative rule files, one set per standard,
│  (pure Python, no I/O)      │    each versioned + linked to its official source
└─────────────────────────────┘
        │
        ▼
one verdict PER STANDARD: COMPLIANT | NON_COMPLIANT | DOUBTFUL
+ structured evidence trail (JSON)

Target output schema (illustrative, subject to change before v0.1):

{
  "entity": { "name": "Example Corp", "ticker": "XMPL", "cik": "0000000000" },
  "facts_snapshot": {
    "source": "SEC EDGAR (XBRL), 10-K FY2025",
    "retrieved": "2026-07-28",
    "hash": "sha256:…"
  },
  "rules_manifest": { "version": "0.1.0", "hash": "sha256:…" },
  "verdicts": [
    {
      "standard": "AAOIFI_SS21",
      "status": "COMPLIANT",
      "review": {
        "status": "expert_reviewed",
        "reviewed_by": "…",
        "scope": "rule file v0.1.0 checked against official source",
        "date": "2026-07-28"
      },
      "checks": [
        {
          "rule_id": "aaoifi_ss21.interest_bearing_debt_to_market_cap",
          "threshold": 0.30,
          "observed": 0.184,
          "pass": true,
          "source": {
            "document": "AAOIFI Shari'ah Standard No. 21 (as amended by SS 59)",
            "url": "https://aaoifi.com/e-standards/?lang=en"
          }
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "standard": "DJIM_SPDJI",
      "status": "DOUBTFUL",
      "review": { "status": "unreviewed" },
      "review_required": true,
      "notes": ["Revenue segment 'entertainment' requires human classification."]
    }
  ],
  "disclaimer": "Not a fatwa. Not investment advice."
}

DOUBTFUL is a first-class status, not a failure mode. Mixed or ambiguous cases are surfaced for qualified human review, and community-validated classifications flow back in through pull requests.

Every rule file carries a review block, and every verdict propagates it. A rule that no qualified reviewer has checked is labeled unreviewed in the output — visibly, not silently.

Purification

Hujja computes two distinct purification methods and never merges them into one formula:

1. Dividend purification (the common index/screener practice; DJIM publishes this ratio and explicitly labels it a purification aid, not a compliance ratio): dividends × (non-permissible income / total income).
2. AAOIFI SS 21 holding-based method: the impermissible income attributable to each share held — the obligation follows the holding, not only the cash dividend received.

Both outputs are labeled with their method and source.

Data policy (hard rules)

• In this repository: SEC EDGAR / XBRL only (public-domain filings of US issuers), plus verdicts and facts derived from them.
• Never in this repository: Yahoo Finance data (its terms are personal-use only), Financial Modeling Prep data (redistribution/display requires a specific licensing agreement), or any other licensed feed. Commercial products built on the engine must license their own data; the open-source engine stays clean.

Target API (subject to change)

pip install hujja

from hujja import Engine

engine = Engine(standards=["AAOIFI_SS21", "DJIM_SPDJI"])
report = engine.screen(facts)      # facts: normalized fundamentals from EDGAR/XBRL

for verdict in report.verdicts:    # one verdict per standard — never merged
    print(verdict.standard, verdict.status)

report.to_json()                   # full evidence trail, hashes included

Agent-ready adapters (planned). All of these are thin wrappers over the same engine and the same rule files — no separate logic, no divergent behavior: CLI, FastAPI service, MCP server (to be published to the official MCP registry), Claude Skill (SKILL.md), OpenAI function-calling schema, LangChain tool. Plus a public verdicts dataset (Hugging Face + Zenodo DOI).

What Hujja is not

• Not a fatwa and not a substitute for a qualified Shariah scholar.
• Not investment, legal, or tax advice, and never a personalized recommendation.
• Not a single halal/haram oracle. Standards disagree; Hujja shows you where and why.
• Not a market-data vendor. It redistributes no licensed data.

Roadmap

• Phase 1a — engine. Pure-Python library; AAOIFI SS 21 + DJIM (Feb 2026 version) rule files; verdicts for ~50–100 large US companies from EDGAR; tests; evidence JSON.
• Phase 1b — coverage & docs. Documentation site; FTSE (both families, kept separate), MSCI (both series, kept separate), and SC Malaysia rule files after source verification; benchmark of Hujja's SC Malaysia rules against the official SAC list.
• Phase 1c — ecosystem. Divergence matrix as an open dataset (Hugging Face + Zenodo DOI); purification module (two methods); FastAPI service; MCP server + official MCP registry entry; agent adapters.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — especially from Shariah scholars, Islamic finance practitioners, and accountants.

• Every rule change must cite its source. A PR touching a rule file must include the official methodology URL, its version/date, and a version bump of the rule file.
• No verbatim standard text. We encode rules as facts and paraphrase; the underlying standard documents are copyrighted, and readers are always linked to the official source.
• Expert review is recorded, opt-in, and narrow. A review block names a reviewer only with their written consent, and records exactly one thing: that this reviewer checked this version of this rule file against the official source on that date. It is not an endorsement of the project, not a certification, and not a fatwa. Reviewers may withdraw at any time.
• Ambiguity taxonomy (DOUBTFUL cases) is debated openly in issues.
• English is the default language; French and Arabic documentation contributions are welcome.

FAQ

Why one verdict per standard instead of a single answer? Because the standards genuinely differ — in thresholds, denominators (market capitalization vs. total assets), averaging windows, and sector rules. Any single merged answer hides a judgment call someone else made for you. Hujja's job is to make that judgment visible.

Is stock X halal? Hujja will tell you how stock X evaluates under each encoded standard, with the numbers and the rule citations. Whether that makes it acceptable for you is a question for you and a qualified scholar.

Why only large US companies at first? SEC EDGAR/XBRL is the only large public-domain source of audited fundamentals. Starting there keeps the open-source repository free of licensed data. Coverage expands as compliant public sources are added.

Can I use this in my product? Yes — Apache-2.0. Keep the attributions and the disclaimers; the verdicts remain informational only.

License

Apache License 2.0 — engine and rule files. Commercial applications built on top of the engine are separate products and do not gate anything in this repository (open-core model).

Disclaimer

Hujja is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It does not issue fatwas, does not provide investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice, and does not make personalized recommendations of any kind. Screening outcomes differ across standards by design and depend on the accuracy and timeliness of public filings, which may contain errors or omissions. No maintainer or contributor accepts liability for decisions made on the basis of this software or its outputs. Before acting, consult a qualified Shariah scholar and a licensed financial professional in your jurisdiction.

Source verification log

Hujja holds itself to the standard it asks of others: every claim above is dated, and this table is re-checked at each release. A source not re-verified for a release is marked as such rather than silently carried over.

Source	Version encoded	Last verified	Status
S&P DJI — DJIM Methodology	February 2026	2026-07-28	Full document read; ready to encode
AAOIFI — Shariʿah Standard No. 21 (w/ SS 59)	Current e-standards edition	2026-07-28	Portal & free access confirmed; thresholds to re-check in the official text before encoding
SC Malaysia — SAC list	November 2025 (effective 28 Nov 2025)	2026-07-28	Official page confirmed; May 2026 list to be pulled
FTSE IdealRatings Islamic Index Series	Ground rules (current)	2026-07-28	Link confirmed; ratios not yet read in full
FTSE Shariah (Yasaar)	—	Not verified	Blocking before encoding
MSCI Islamic Index Series / M Series	Two-series split confirmed	2026-07-28	Denominators confirmed on MSCI's index page; thresholds not yet read in the methodology PDF

References (official sources)

• AAOIFI — Shariʿah standards, free official e-standards portal: https://aaoifi.com/e-standards/?lang=en
• S&P Dow Jones Indices — Dow Jones Islamic Market Indices Methodology, February 2026: https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/methodologies/methodology-dj-islamic-market-indices.pdf
• Securities Commission Malaysia — List of Shariah-Compliant Securities (SAC, semi-annual): https://www.sc.com.my/development/icm/shariah-compliant-securities
• FTSE Russell — FTSE IdealRatings Islamic Index Series Ground Rules: https://www.lseg.com/content/dam/ftse-russell/en_us/documents/ground-rules/ftse-idealratings-islamic-index-series-ground-rules.pdf
• MSCI — Islamic Indexes overview (two series, two denominators): https://www.msci.com/indexes/group/islamic-indexes
• MSCI — MSCI Islamic Index Series Methodology (latest): https://www.msci.com/index/methodology/latest/Islamic

A note on copyright: numeric thresholds and screening criteria are facts and are not copyrightable (see Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone*, 499 U.S. 340 (1991)). Hujja encodes those facts, paraphrases everything else, and always links to the official documents — it never reproduces standard texts verbatim.*