AAOIFI vs Dow Jones Islamic vs S&P Sharia vs MSCI Islamic

Dow Jones Islamic Market Index is the largest of the four by raw count: approximately 3,000 stocks globally pass its screen. The DJIMI universe spans 70-plus country indices and includes US, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern listings. It is the index most commonly tracked by Islamic mutual funds because of its breadth and Dow Jones's long history of maintaining the index.

MSCI Islamic indices together cover approximately 1,300 stocks. The MSCI universe is derived from the broader MSCI World, MSCI Emerging Markets, and MSCI USA benchmarks by applying the Shariah overlay - so the country and sector mix of MSCI Islamic closely tracks the broader MSCI All Country World Index minus the excluded names. This makes MSCI Islamic the most popular index for institutional Islamic equity mandates that want a Shariah-compliant equivalent of a familiar benchmark.

S&P 500 Sharia is much narrower because it starts from the S&P 500 itself - it filters those 500 names down to roughly 225 compliant constituents. Other S&P Shariah indices (S&P Global BMI Shariah, S&P Pan Arab Shariah) extend the methodology to broader universes, but the S&P 500 Sharia is the most-tracked because it offers a recognisable benchmark.

AAOIFI itself does not publish an index. AAOIFI publishes the standard; index providers and individual screening services then implement that standard against their own universes. invest-like's implementation against the 12,500-ticker US-listed universe produces approximately 1,500 compliant names. This is similar in scale to MSCI Islamic globally, narrower than DJIMI's 3,000, and substantially broader than S&P 500 Sharia's 225 because invest-like screens the full US-listed universe rather than just S&P 500 members.

For most stocks, all four screens agree. Apple is compliant under every mainstream Islamic screen. JPMorgan Chase fails every mainstream Islamic screen. Visa passes every mainstream Islamic screen. The disagreement happens at the margins, in three specific bands.

The first disagreement is the debt ratio band. A company whose interest-bearing debt is 31 percent of trailing 36-month average market cap passes DJIMI (under 33 percent), passes MSCI Islamic (under 33.33 percent), and fails AAOIFI's stricter 30 percent interpretation. The S&P Sharia case is different because S&P uses total assets as the denominator - a company that passes under market cap might fail under total assets or vice versa depending on the price-to-book ratio. Several large-cap names (think capital-intensive industrials, telecoms, and utilities) sit in this band at any given time.

The second disagreement is the denominator selection itself. The market-cap denominator (AAOIFI, DJIMI) makes the test pro-cyclical: as the market rises, companies' debt ratios mechanically fall, making compliance easier; as the market falls, ratios mechanically rise, pushing borderline names into non-compliance even if their underlying debt has not changed. The total-assets denominator (S&P, MSCI) is less pro-cyclical because total assets are slower-moving. AAOIFI's use of the 36-month average market cap is an explicit attempt to dampen the pro-cyclicality.

The third disagreement is the primary-business exclusion-list scope. AAOIFI and FTSE Shariah apply stricter readings on financial-services adjacencies: they tend to exclude exchanges that derive material revenue from interest-bearing-instrument trading volume, and they often flag asset managers with large proprietary trading desks. DJIMI is slightly looser on these adjacencies. The result is that a handful of large financial-data and exchange names pass under DJIMI but fail under AAOIFI.

invest-like uses AAOIFI Standard 21 as the canonical default for three reasons. First, AAOIFI is the only universally recognised institutional standard-setter in Islamic finance. Its Shariah Board is the deepest panel of senior scholars covering all four major Sunni schools of jurisprudence. Its standards are adopted as law in some jurisdictions and used as guidance in many more. The other three mainstream screens (DJIMI, S&P Sharia, MSCI Islamic) all derive their methodologies from the same four-test framework AAOIFI codified, and they all reference AAOIFI as a baseline in their methodology documents.

Second, AAOIFI is the strictest of the mainstream screens on the debt-ratio dimension, which means a stock that passes AAOIFI also passes DJIMI, MSCI Islamic, and (on the equivalent leverage test) S&P Sharia. Picking the strictest standard as the canonical default gives users from any Islamic background a verdict they can trust. A user who personally follows DJIMI can read an AAOIFI-passing verdict on invest-like and be confident the stock also passes their preferred standard. The reverse is not true: a stock that passes DJIMI might fail AAOIFI, so a DJIMI-passing verdict would not satisfy an AAOIFI-strict user.

Third, AAOIFI is the screen most-aligned with the position of contemporary Islamic-finance scholars. The AAOIFI Shariah Board includes Mufti Taqi Usmani, widely regarded as one of the leading living scholars of Islamic commercial law and the chairman of AAOIFI's Shariah Board. His public position on share trading aligns directly with the four-test structure codified in Standard 21 and with the conservative 30 percent debt threshold. Users seeking a screen that reflects mainstream scholarly opinion in 2026 will find AAOIFI is the closest match.

For users whose local scholar or madhhab uses different thresholds (some Hanafi rulings are stricter on test 3 purification; some Maliki rulings are stricter on test 4 denominators), the recommendation is to treat the AAOIFI screen as a starting point. Use the per-stock /halal/[ticker]/ pages to see the exact debt ratio number, the exact reason codes, and the exact named overrides applied - then apply your scholar's additional criteria on top.