No. A sukuk's compliance depends on its structure, underlying assets, recourse, and documentation. Some instruments fail screening, and some change disposition under AAOIFI Standard 62.

Sukuk Screening: Structure, Compliance, and the Standard 62 Inflection Point

A data-driven 2026 guide to how Islamic fixed income is built, where it breaks, and how to screen it (educational; non-prescriptive)

Editorial & compliance notice — please read first

This article is educational research, not a fatwa and not investment advice. Shariah rulings on specific instruments belong to qualified scholars and Shariah supervisory boards; reasonable scholars and standards bodies disagree. Market figures are attributed to the data provider that published them — different providers (IIFM, S&P Global, LSEG) report materially different sukuk totals because of differing methodologies, and we deliberately do not blend them into a single series. Fund and ETF figures are point-in-time and change daily; verify current data before acting. Where a claim rests on a single source or a secondary relay, we say so.

"Sukuk" is routinely translated as "Islamic bonds," and that translation is the source of most of the confusion surrounding them. A conventional bond is a debt: a promise to repay principal plus interest. A sukuk is supposed to be the opposite — a certificate of ownership in a real asset or enterprise, whose holder earns a share of the income that asset produces and bears a share of its risk. The gap between what sukuk are supposed to be and how many of them are actually engineered is the central tension of the entire asset class, and it is the reason sukuk cannot be screened the way a checking account or a plain bond can. Screening sukuk means looking past the label at the structure.

This guide lays out the sukuk market in numbers, the contract families that underpin it, the compliance fault line that runs through it — from Sheikh Taqi Usmani's 2008 critique to AAOIFI's contested Standard 62 — the recourse lessons from real defaults, why sukuk screening differs fundamentally from equity screening, and what instrument-level screening must actually check. It closes with how Halal Terminal screens sukuk directly.

1. What a sukuk actually is — and the fault line inside it

In a conventional bond, the investor lends money and the issuer owes it back with interest. That structure is impermissible under Islamic law because the return is riba — a predetermined increase on a loan, divorced from any underlying productive risk. Classical Islamic commercial law also disfavours gharar (excessive uncertainty) and maysir (gambling), and insists that profit be earned by bearing genuine commercial risk on real economic activity. Sukuk are engineered to satisfy those constraints by routing the investor's capital through ownership of, or partnership in, something real: a leased asset, a portfolio of commodities, a joint venture. The return is framed as rent, profit, or sale margin rather than interest, and — in principle — the investor's capital is exposed to the performance of the underlying asset rather than guaranteed.

The hard question is whether that framing reflects economic substance or merely legal form. A great deal of sukuk engineering exists to deliver bond-like cash flows (a predictable coupon, principal back at par) while wrapping them in the paperwork of a sale or lease. When the wrapping dominates the substance, the instrument drifts back toward the riba it was meant to avoid — and that drift is exactly what screening has to detect.

The single most important distinction in sukuk is therefore asset-backed versus asset-based, and it determines both compliance and what happens when things go wrong ^¹⁷.

Asset-backed sukuk involve a true sale of the underlying asset from the originator to a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that issues the certificates. Holders own the asset; their returns and their recovery depend on that asset; and they have no recourse to the originator if the asset underperforms. The asset's market price genuinely varies over the life of the deal.
Asset-based sukuk — the far more common type — do not transfer real ownership. The SPV holds the asset in form, but the economic substance is a financing arrangement: holders retain recourse to the originator through a "purchase undertaking" obliging the originator to buy the asset back, usually at face value. These instruments "more closely resemble conventional bonds" ^¹⁷.

It is the asset-based structure — recourse to the obligor, repurchase at par, an effectively guaranteed return — that critics argue replicates the very debt characteristics sukuk were meant to avoid. Most of the market is asset-based, and that single fact explains both the 2008 controversy and the Standard 62 fight described below.

2. The market in numbers (2024–2026)

2.1 Size, issuance, and the data-provider problem

The first thing to understand about sukuk market data is that there is no single agreed total. Per the International Islamic Financial Market (IIFM) Sukuk Report 2025 — the industry's most cited primary tally — total global sukuk issuance was US$205.1 billion in 2024, a modest decline of roughly 3.3% from US$212.0 billion in 2023, while global outstanding sukuk stock stood at US$902.82 billion as of 31 December 2024 ^¹ ^³.

But the headline number depends entirely on methodology. For the same 2024 year, S&P Global Ratings reported issuance of US$234.9 billion and LSEG roughly US$254.3 billion ^¹. The spread — nearly US$50 billion between providers — comes from differing treatment of short-term rollovers, currency conversion, and inclusion criteria. This is not a rounding quibble: it is large enough to change the story an analyst tells. The practical lesson for any serious reader is to attribute every headline figure to its source and never chain one provider's number to another's as a growth series.

2.2 Domestic versus international

Sukuk are overwhelmingly a domestic, local-currency phenomenon, but the cross-border market is where the growth and the headlines are. IIFM reports international (cross-border) issuance hit a record US$65.6 billion in 2024, up 24.5% from US$52.7 billion in 2023, even as domestic issuance fell to US$139.5 billion from US$159.4 billion ^¹. Cumulatively since 2001, domestic issuance (about US$1,675 billion) dwarfs international (about US$536 billion) — a reminder that the asset class is anchored in a handful of national markets even as USD deals dominate global coverage ^¹. The two markets behave differently: domestic issuance is driven by local sovereign funding programmes and bank balance-sheet management; the international market is where benchmark-sized, ratings-driven, structurally complex deals live — and where compliance scrutiny is most intense.

2.3 The 2025 surge and the 2026 outlook

On S&P Global's methodology, the market accelerated sharply in 2025: global issuance rose to US$264.8 billion, up 12.7% from S&P's own 2024 base of US$234.9 billion, and S&P forecasts US$270–280 billion for 2026, including US$100–110 billion of foreign-currency issuance ^⁵. Foreign-currency issuance overall exceeded US$100 billion in 2025 — nearly double the 2021 volume ^⁵. Industry coverage also marked total outstanding sukuk surpassing the US$1 trillion milestone in 2025 ^²⁰. (Again: these are S&P-basis figures and should not be spliced onto IIFM's US$205 billion 2024 total.)

2.4 The geographic engines

The growth is concentrated. The GCC — led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE — accounted for about 45% of issuance volume in 2025, ahead of Malaysia ^⁵. Saudi Arabia issued roughly US$72.5 billion (including about US$38 billion in foreign currency, the FX portion up about 35% year on year), and the UAE issued about US$22.1 billion (including roughly US$19 billion in foreign currency) ^⁵. The domestic local-currency markets, meanwhile, remain dominated by Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia per IIFM. In short: Asia anchors the outstanding stock; the Gulf drives the international USD surge — and the Gulf's appetite for cross-border issuance is exactly what puts Standard 62, an AAOIFI standard, at the centre of the market's future.

2.5 What is driving the growth

The expansion is structural, not cyclical. Three forces compound. First, sovereign funding: Gulf governments running large diversification programmes need deep, repeatable funding channels, and sukuk let them tap both conventional and faith-based demand from a single issuance — which is why Saudi Arabia and the UAE now drive the international market. Second, Islamic-bank balance-sheet management: Islamic banks must hold Shariah-compliant high-quality liquid assets, and sukuk are the only instrument that fits, creating structural, price-insensitive demand that anchors the domestic markets. Third, a growing investor base: the broader Islamic-finance industry it serves is measured in the trillions of dollars, and a rising share of that capital seeks income-generating instruments rather than only equities. Layered on top is the ESG overlap (Section 7), which brings conventional sustainability-mandated buyers into the asset class. The net effect is a market with both a captive domestic bid and an expanding cross-border one — and, consequently, rising scrutiny of whether all that issuance is genuinely compliant.

3. Sukuk structures and what actually gets issued

3.1 The contract families

Sukuk are named for the Islamic contract that underpins them. The principal families are:

Ijarah (lease): Investors own a tangible asset and earn rent. Because the income is genuine rent on a real asset, ijarah is widely regarded as among the cleanest and most defensible structures, and ijarah sukuk are freely tradable because the certificate represents an ownership share in a real asset.
Murabaha (cost-plus sale): Return comes from a deferred-payment sale of an asset at a disclosed markup. Because it generates a fixed receivable (a debt), murabaha sukuk are generally not freely tradable at other than par under stricter interpretations — you would be trading debt, which most scholars prohibit except at face value.
Wakala (agency): An agent invests the proceeds into a pool of Shariah-compliant assets for a fee plus performance incentive. Its flexibility — the pool can blend tangible and financial assets — makes it the workhorse of the international market.
Mudarabah / Musharakah (partnership): Returns flow from genuine profit-and-loss sharing between capital providers and the manager/partner. Closest to the equity-like ideal Shariah scholars prefer, but harder to make palatable to fixed-income buyers who want predictable coupons.
Salam and Istisna (forward and construction finance): Salam funds the advance purchase of a commodity for future delivery; istisna funds the construction or manufacture of an asset. Both are common in project and infrastructure finance, where the "asset" does not yet exist at issuance.
Hybrid: Combinations (for example, a pool mixing ijarah assets with murabaha receivables) engineered to balance tradability, yield, and asset availability. To remain tradable, hybrids typically must keep tangible assets above a threshold share of the pool.

3.2 The prevalence data

What gets issued is not evenly spread across these families. In the 2024 international market, IIFM data show Wakala was the single most-used structure at 42.34% (about US$27.8 billion), hybrid structures collectively 35.51% (about US$23.3 billion), Ijarah 15.55% (about US$10.2 billion), and Mudarabah 6.64% (about US$4.35 billion) ^². The dominance of wakala and hybrid structures — rather than pure ijarah — is itself a signal: issuers gravitate toward flexible, intangible-asset-friendly forms, precisely the forms whose true-ownership credentials are most contested, and precisely the forms most exposed to a tightening of the ownership requirement.

3.3 The SPV and the purchase undertaking — where form and substance diverge

Almost every sukuk runs through a special purpose vehicle. The originator sells (or appears to sell) an asset to an SPV; the SPV issues certificates to investors and uses the proceeds to pay the originator; the asset throws off rent or profit that the SPV passes to certificate holders; and at maturity the asset is sold back. The mechanism that makes most sukuk behave like bonds is the purchase undertaking — a binding promise by the originator to repurchase the asset at a pre-agreed price, almost always equal to the original face value plus any accrued-but-unpaid distributions.

That single document is what converts a risk-sharing instrument into a principal-protected one. If the originator must buy the asset back at par regardless of the asset's market value, the investor's downside is the originator's credit, not the asset's performance — which is the economic definition of a bond. This is the heart of the asset-based critique, and the precise feature that the recourse cases in Section 5 turned on and that Standard 62 in Section 4 seeks to constrain.

3.4 Why structure is the screening question

Because two sukuk with identical yields can sit on opposite sides of the compliance line depending on whether ownership genuinely transfers, structure is not a footnote — it is the screen. A wakala over a compliant asset pool with real risk-sharing is a different instrument, for screening purposes, than an asset-based ijarah whose purchase undertaking guarantees par. This is why credible sukuk screening operates at the instrument level, reading the documentation basis, the recourse terms, and the purchase undertaking, not at the issuer level.

4. The compliance problem: from Usmani to Standard 62

4.1 The 2008 Usmani critique

The defining compliance event in sukuk history came in February 2008, when AAOIFI's board of scholars, led by Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, concluded that "as many as 85 percent of sukuk sold to date may not comply with all the precepts of Shariah" ^¹⁷. In his November 2007 paper Sukuk and their Contemporary Applications, Usmani set out three differentiating requirements that the market was routinely violating: sukuk must represent ownership in assets that generate the profits; payments should be profit-shares after costs, not fixed returns; and the maturity value should reflect the asset's current market value, not a guaranteed return of principal ^¹⁷. The problem, in his framing, was that "by complex mechanisms sukuk had taken on the same characteristics as conventional interest-bearing bonds" — through guaranteed returns and repurchase obligations ^¹⁷.

The market reaction was immediate: global sukuk issuance contracted from roughly US$50 billion in 2007 to about US$14.9 billion in 2008 ^¹⁷. The episode established the template for every compliance debate since: the dispute is not about the label sukuk but about whether ownership and risk genuinely pass to the holder.

4.2 AAOIFI Shari'ah Standard 62 — what it would change

Seventeen years later, AAOIFI's draft Shari'ah Standard 62 has reopened exactly that question, this time with the force of a binding standard in the jurisdictions that adopt AAOIFI rules. Released as an exposure draft in November 2023, with the feedback deadline extended twice — the final extension to 31 July 2024 — Standard 62 would require that sukuk issuers formally transfer legal ownership of the underlying assets to investors, converting the prevailing asset-based model into genuinely asset-backed securities ^¹⁴. As AAOIFI Secretary General Omar Mustafa Ansari put it, "Sukuk can never be a conventional bond" ^¹³.

The draft's language is uncompromising: sukuk are "an investment instrument wherein their owners share the reward (ghunm) [as well as] the liability (ghurm) of the underlying assets," and "if [transfer of ownership] is not acceptable, then it is not permitted to carry [the] sale of the underlying assets to the certificate holders" ^¹⁴. In practice this would mandate real asset transfer and registration, expand documentation, expose investors directly to asset performance — and, on default, potentially let holders seize and liquidate the asset faster ^¹³. Practitioner analysis notes the change would impose the "formalities of asset transfer and registration," "expanded documentation requirements," and "direct investor exposure to underlying asset risks," potentially rendering even asset-backed ijarah sukuk "unattractive to originators and investors alike" ^¹⁴.

4.3 The market reaction

The rating agencies reacted with caution bordering on alarm. On 19 July 2024, S&P Global Ratings warned that adopting Standard 62 "as [it has] been presented could disrupt the market," potentially leading to "further market fragmentation or issuance could be put on hold until sukuk structurers figure out a middle ground"; S&P also flagged that asset-registration costs could make sukuk more expensive than conventional issuance and uneconomical in some jurisdictions ^¹⁵. Moody's similarly judged the standard would "cool sukuk issuance" by pushing some issuers to alternative funding, increasing "the legal complexity of the sukuk structure" and transaction costs, while noting holders "may benefit in the event of the issuer insolvency in terms of recovery prospects relative to unsecured creditors" ^¹⁶. Moody's sized the cross-border exposure at roughly 24% of 2023 cross-border issuance, versus a smaller ~13% of local-currency issuance in the dozen countries that fully adopt AAOIFI standards ^¹⁶.

A central risk is fragmentation: because adoption of AAOIFI standards is uneven across jurisdictions, a standard applied in some markets but not others could split sukuk into incompatible compliance regimes, complicating cross-border investment and indexation ^¹⁸. Not everyone agrees the impact will be dramatic — some legal analysis frames the changes as more evolutionary than revolutionary, since well-structured deals already contemplate real assets — but even the measured views concede that documentation, cost, and timelines would rise ^¹⁴.

By late 2025 the standard was on hold. AAOIFI confirmed it had "put it on hold," with at least one further consultation round — involving central banks, major issuers, rating firms, and lawyers — required before any final decision ^¹³. The episode underscores the asset class's core unresolved tension: tighten compliance toward true ownership and you risk the liquidity and fixed-income appeal that built the market; leave it loose and you invite the Usmani critique all over again.

4.4 Why this matters for screening

For anyone screening sukuk, Standard 62 is not an abstraction — it can move an instrument's verdict. A sukuk that screens as compliant under prevailing asset-based norms may screen differently if assessed against a true-ownership-transfer standard. That is why a single binary "halal/haram" verdict is inadequate for sukuk: the responsible output is a pre- and post-Standard 62 disposition, showing how the answer moves under the newer, stricter lens, so an investor sees not just where an instrument stands today but how exposed it is to the standard's eventual adoption.

5. When sukuk fail: defaults, recourse, and the Dana Gas precedent

5.1 The early defaults

The 2008–2009 cycle delivered the first real tests of what sukuk holders actually own. Golden Belt 1, a US$650 million sukuk linked to Saudi Arabia's Saad Group, required restructuring in 2009, with S&P downgrading it amid "non-availability of vital information" ^¹⁷. Kuwait's Investment Dar defaulted on a US$100 million sukuk in 2009, accompanied by a dispute over "the Shariah aspects of the contracts" ^¹⁷. And East Cameron Partners in Louisiana — which had issued an award-winning US$167.67 million sukuk in 2006 — filed for bankruptcy in 2008, leaving courts to wrestle with whether sukuk holders or other creditors had priority; the case prompted Fitch to express doubts about the "validity" of asset transfer in an originator insolvency ^¹⁷. As one practitioner observed, "courts have struggled to reconcile the substance and form of the contract" — was it a sale, a lease, a partnership, or a financing arrangement? ^¹⁷

5.2 Dana Gas: the purchase undertaking wins

The defining modern recourse precedent is Dana Gas. The company's US$850 million mudarabah sukuk (issued 8 May 2013 via the SPV "Dana Gas Sukuk Limited," listed on the Irish Stock Exchange, maturing 31 October 2017) became the subject of litigation when Dana Gas challenged the instrument's enforceability. In November 2017, the English Commercial Court (Leggatt J, [2017] EWHC 2928 (Comm)) held that the English-law purchase undertaking was valid and enforceable regardless of the underlying documents' enforceability under UAE law or Shariah ^⁹. In other words, even assuming the Shariah-governed mudarabah documents were unenforceable, the contractual promise to purchase — governed by English law — still bound the obligor.

5.3 The lesson

Dana Gas crystallized what the earlier defaults had hinted: in most cross-border, asset-based sukuk, investor protection rests on the English-law purchase undertaking, not on asset ownership or Shariah compliance. That is precisely the feature Standard 62 seeks to dismantle — and precisely why screening must read recourse and documentation, not just the structure's name. An instrument whose entire downside protection is a par repurchase undertaking is, economically, much closer to a bond than its certificate suggests. The recourse history is also why the asset-backed/asset-based distinction is not academic: in a true asset-backed deal, the asset is the protection; in an asset-based deal, the originator's promise is — and a promise is only as good as the law that enforces it and the credit that stands behind it.

6. Liquidity and the secondary market

Even compliant sukuk carry a structural cost: they are harder to trade. Peer-reviewed evidence — Almaskati (2023), "Revisiting the question of liquidity: are sukuk less liquid than conventional bonds?", published in the Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research — finds, using propensity-score matching against comparable conventional bonds, that sukuk are "significantly less liquid" on price-based bid-ask and high-low spread measures, and that the gap is "more prominent in the case of corporate issuances" than sovereigns ^⁸. Much of the market is bought to hold to maturity, thinning secondary trading; investors who want the asset class but not the single-name liquidity risk often access it through diversified funds. The liquidity discount narrows as the market matures and as benchmark-sized sovereign deals proliferate, but it remains a real consideration for any sukuk allocation — and one that interacts with Standard 62, since several analysts warned that mandatory asset transfer could further impair liquidity by complicating what is being traded.

7. Green and sustainability sukuk

One of the fastest-growing corners of the market sits at the intersection of Islamic finance and ESG. Per LSEG's Green and Sustainability Sukuk 2024 update (produced with the Islamic Development Bank and ICMA), green and sustainability sukuk issuance reached US$11.9 billion in the first nine months of 2024, up 18% year on year — equal to about 6.4% of total sukuk issuance and 1.6% of total ESG bond issuance ^⁷. The GCC accounted for roughly 58% of 2024 issuance, with Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE leading the nine-month tally ^⁷. The thesis is intuitive: a sukuk is already tied to identifiable real assets, which makes earmarking proceeds to green or social projects a natural fit, and the asset-linkage that complicates conventional ESG verification is, here, native to the instrument. Expect this segment to keep outgrowing the broader market.

8. Investing in sukuk: funds and ETFs

For investors who would rather not assemble and monitor individual instruments, sukuk ETFs bundle a diversified portfolio into a single listed security. The category benchmark is the SP Funds Dow Jones Global Sukuk ETF (SPSK). Per the issuer and primary filings, SPSK carries a 0.50% expense ratio, launched 27 December 2019, and tracks the Dow Jones Sukuk Total Return Index of USD-denominated, investment-grade global sukuk, holding 150+ positions (roughly 172), with a 30-Day SEC Yield of 4.41% as of 31 March 2026 ^¹¹. Its portfolio is split roughly evenly between sovereign and corporate sukuk: the SEC NPORT filing dated 28 February 2025 shows net assets of about US$287.4 million, with Foreign Government Sukuk at 47.0% and Corporate Sukuk at 50.9% of the book ^¹². (That AUM is a point-in-time snapshot and moves daily; verify current figures before acting.)

When assessing a sukuk fund, the structural questions matter as much as the headline yield and fee. What index does it track, and on whose compliance methodology is that index built? What is the sovereign-versus-corporate split, given that corporate sukuk carry the wider liquidity discount documented in Section 6? How concentrated is it by issuer and by jurisdiction — a fund heavy in one or two adopting jurisdictions is more exposed to Standard 62 than a globally diversified one? And crucially, does the fund's compliance screen operate at the instrument level, reading structure and recourse, or does it rely on the index provider's label? A 30-day SEC yield and a 0.50% expense ratio tell you the price; only a look-through to the holdings tells you what you are buying.

A sukuk ETF does not relieve an investor of the compliance question — it relocates it. The fund's compliance is the aggregate of its holdings, and an index-tracking sukuk fund inherits whatever structural exposures (asset-based vs asset-backed, recourse, Standard 62 sensitivity) sit inside those holdings. Decomposing the fund to its underlying instruments is therefore the only way to know what you actually own — which is exactly the instrument-level screening problem, one layer up.

9. Screening sukuk versus screening stocks — why the methodology differs

Investors familiar with equity screening often assume sukuk are screened the same way. They are not, and understanding why is the key to reading any sukuk verdict.

Equity screening is ratio-based. To decide whether a stock is Shariah-compliant, the major methodologies — AAOIFI, Dow Jones Islamic Market (DJIM), FTSE, MSCI, and S&P — apply a two-stage test: a business-activity screen (excluding companies whose core revenue comes from alcohol, gambling, conventional finance, pork, tobacco, adult content, and weapons) followed by financial-ratio screens (limits on interest-bearing debt, on interest-bearing securities and cash, and on impure income, each measured against market capitalisation or total assets). The methodologies differ mainly in their thresholds and denominators — for example, whether debt is divided by a trailing-average market cap or by total assets — but they are all fundamentally arithmetic tests on a company's financial statements.

Sukuk screening is structural. A sukuk has no income statement to run ratios against; what matters is the contract. The compliance questions are categorical, not arithmetic: Does ownership of a permissible asset genuinely transfer to holders, or is this an asset-based wrapper around a loan? Is there a purchase undertaking that guarantees principal? Is the income rent, profit-share, or a disguised fixed coupon? Are the underlying assets and the obligor's business themselves permissible? Is the structure tradable, or does it represent a debt that may only change hands at par? And — increasingly — how does the instrument fare under AAOIFI Standard 62's true-ownership requirement?

This is why the same five methodology names do not map cleanly onto fixed income, and why a credible sukuk verdict reads the prospectus and the structure rather than computing a debt-to-market-cap ratio. It is also why sukuk screening benefits from a registry that captures structure, documentation basis, and recourse as first-class data — because those, not financial ratios, are the inputs to the verdict.

10. How Halal Terminal screens sukuk

10.1 The instrument-level checklist

Everything above reduces to a checklist that an issuer-level or label-level view cannot satisfy. Credible sukuk screening must read, per instrument: the structure (ijarah, murabaha, wakala, mudarabah, musharakah, salam, istisna, hybrid); whether it is asset-backed or asset-based; the recourse terms and any purchase undertaking; the documentation basis and governing law; the permissibility of the underlying assets and the issuer's activities; and the tradability implications of the structure. Two sukuk with the same coupon can land on opposite sides of the line on these inputs alone.

10.2 Pre- and post-Standard 62 disposition

Because Standard 62 can change an instrument's verdict, a single binary output is misleading. The responsible disposition is two-sided: how the instrument screens under prevailing asset-based norms, and how it would screen under a true-ownership-transfer standard. That is the difference between telling an investment committee "this is compliant" and telling it "this is compliant today but would need restructuring under Standard 62" — the detail that actually informs a decision.

10.3 The sukuk registry and API

Halal Terminal screens sukuk directly — not only equities and ETFs. Its structural sukuk registry is searchable by issuer, country, structure, documentation basis, currency, and maturity, and every instrument resolves to an AAOIFI pre- and post-Standard 62 disposition alongside a per-methodology grid. A portfolio-impact view scores the sukuk sleeve of a portfolio under both lenses at once. The same engine is available programmatically:

Search the registry: GET /api/sukuk/search — filter by issuer, country, structure, documentation_basis, currency, maturity.
Resolve one instrument by ISIN: GET /api/sukuk/{isin} — full structure, dispositions, and per-methodology grid.
Look up an issuer's instruments: GET /api/sukuk/issuer/{lei}.
Score a portfolio's sukuk sleeve: POST /api/sukuk/portfolio-impact.

For fund-level exposure, Halal Terminal also screens sukuk ETFs such as SPSK through its ETF analysis, decomposing the fund to its underlying instruments. For the broader context on Islamic capital markets and screening methodologies, see What Is Islamic Finance?.

11. Conclusion

Sukuk are the fastest-internationalizing corner of a market whose outstanding stock has crossed US$1 trillion, and the most conceptually demanding to screen. The numbers are real and growing; the structures are flexible and, increasingly, asset-light; and the compliance question — unresolved since Usmani in 2008 — has been reopened with real teeth by Standard 62. None of that can be navigated with a label, and none of it yields to the ratio arithmetic that works for equities. It requires reading each instrument's structure, ownership, and recourse, and expressing the answer as a disposition that accounts for where the standards are heading, not just where they are. For an investor, the payoff of doing this properly is concrete: avoiding instruments that are compliant only on paper, sizing exposure to the Standard 62 transition deliberately rather than by accident, and being able to defend every line of a sukuk allocation to a scholar, a client, or a Shariah board. That is what instrument-level sukuk screening is for.

Frequently asked questions

Does Halal Terminal screen sukuk? Yes. Halal Terminal screens sukuk by ISIN, by issuer LEI, by registry search, and across a portfolio, with AAOIFI pre- and post-Standard 62 dispositions and a per-methodology grid.

Are all sukuk halal? No. A sukuk's compliance depends on its structure, underlying assets, recourse, and documentation. Most issuance is asset-based (recourse to the obligor, repurchase at par), which critics argue replicates conventional debt; some instruments fail screening, and some change disposition under AAOIFI Standard 62.

What is AAOIFI Standard 62? A draft AAOIFI Shari'ah standard (exposure draft November 2023, on hold as of late 2025) that would require genuine transfer of asset ownership to sukuk holders — converting prevailing asset-based structures into asset-backed ones. Rating agencies including S&P and Moody's have warned it could raise costs and slow issuance, which is why Halal Terminal records both a pre- and post-Standard 62 disposition for each instrument.

Educational research; not a fatwa and not investment advice. Consult a qualified scholar for rulings specific to your situation.