The Mizan API
A free, public, read only API that screens a US-listed company against four Sharia equity standards, and shows the numbers behind every verdict. No account, no key, GET requests only.
Endpoints
GET /api/v1/screen/{ticker}
Screens one company, first on its business and then on its debt. Returns a say sentence to read aloud, the live price and its timestamp, the share count and where it came from, market capitalisation, the filing figures used and the quarter they belong to, the business screen per standard, then one block per standard with the ratio, the threshold, the verdict (compliant, which includes the business screen, and debt_compliant for the debt test alone) and a borderline flag. A company name works as well as a symbol (/screen/nvidia).
GET /api/v1/portfolio?holdings=AAPL:5000,MSFT:3000
Screens up to 15 holdings at once. Returns the share of the portfolio that is compliant under each standard, the holdings that fail, and a combined dividend purification ratio. Values after the colon are optional and weight the result.
GET /api/v1/zakat?currency=USD&cash=12000&gold_grams=40&shares_longterm=20000
Works out zakat on cash, gold, silver, shares and business stock, using live gold and silver prices. Returns whether zakat is due, the amount at 2.5%, the breakdown, and the nisab used (silver by default, or nisab=gold). Long-term shares count at 25% of market value unless you set share_zakatable_pct; shares held for trading count in full. Debts due now are deducted. Nothing you enter is stored.
GET /api/v1/purify/{ticker}?dividend={amount}
The share of a dividend to give to charity: the company's interest income over its total revenue, from its latest annual 10-K that reports interest income. If that is older than its latest 10-K (Apple stopped reporting the figure after fiscal 2023), the response says so. Give a dividend amount and it returns the sum to give.
GET /api/v1/alternatives/{ticker}
Halal alternatives to a holding: companies Mizan covers in the same industry (or the nearest related one) whose business is permitted and whose debt passes all four standards at the last quarter-end, largest first, plus Shariah index funds for the US and the UK.
GET /api/v1/standards
The four standards, their denominators and their thresholds.
GET /api/v1/health
Service status and the provenance of the research panel being served.
How a verdict is reached
First the business. Each standard excludes companies whose main business it prohibits: conventional banking and insurance, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pork and adult content under all four; weapons, hotels and music under Dow Jones Islamic and MSCI Islamic; advertising under S&P Shariah. Mizan reads the main business from the SEC industry code and a list of named companies, and a company excluded under a standard is non-compliant under it whatever its debt. Industries judged case by case (property trusts, restaurants, media) come back as needing a closer look, with no verdict. The 5% cap on prohibited side income is not checked yet.
Then the debt. Every standard divides interest-bearing debt by a measure of size and compares the result with a threshold. A company is non-compliant when the ratio exceeds the threshold. The averaging window is what separates the standards, and it is the reason a stock can move in or out of compliance on price alone.
- AAOIFI: debt over market capitalisation on the day, threshold 0.30
- Dow Jones Islamic Market: debt over trailing 24-month average market capitalisation, threshold one third
- S&P Shariah: debt over trailing 36-month average market capitalisation, threshold one third
- MSCI Islamic: debt over total assets, threshold one third
Any ratio within one percent of its threshold is returned with borderline set to true, which is where a small price move flips the verdict and where published work that rounds one third to 0.33 disagrees.
Where the numbers come from
Debt and total assets come from company filings through the SEC's XBRL company facts. Price and shares outstanding are live market data, consolidated across share classes, which matters because the SEC cover-page field names one class and for several companies has not been refreshed in years. When the two share counts disagree materially, the response says so in its notes.
When it refuses
A malformed ticker returns 400. A company outside the 424-company panel returns 404 and says so. If a live price or share count cannot be read, the service returns 503 with the reason rather than screening on stale data. A standard whose averaging window cannot be filled returns no verdict for that standard, with a reason, rather than an average of whatever is available.
Machine readable
Coverage and limits
424 large-cap US companies, quarterly from 2010. Responses are cached for 15 minutes. No rate limits are imposed. Contact [email protected].
Research
The screening rules and the panel come from Price-Driven Churn in Islamic Equity Screening. Mizan is research output, not investment advice and not a fatwa.