The Methodology

The Six Pillars of Real Compliance

This is the framework used throughout /audit to evaluate Islamic finance products. It is derived from AAOIFI Shariah Standards 8 + 9 + 12 (Murābaḥah, Ijārah, Mushārakah) combined with the AMJA + IIFA deliberations on contemporary product structures. Not original to this site; codified here as a single framework for consistent application.

1. Genuine ownership transfer. Does the provider actually take ownership of the asset (with associated risks), or is the ownership a paper formality that immediately transfers to the buyer?
2. Real economic risk-sharing. In a Mushārakah, do both partners genuinely bear loss exposure? Or is one partner contractually shielded?
3. Time-of-use rent, not time-of-money rent. In an Ijārah, is rent paid for use of a real asset (the building, the car) — or is it a thinly-veiled charge for the time value of the borrowed money?
4. No tying to benchmark interest rates. Mark-ups and rentals should be priced on real-world variables — not simply pegged to BBSW, LIBOR, or RBA cash rate. (Practical note: many providers reference benchmark rates for convenience; the structural question is whether the underlying economic logic is independent.)
5. No synthetic risk-elimination clauses. Clauses that guarantee the provider's return regardless of asset performance, or guarantee the customer's principal regardless of Mushārakah outcome, structurally replicate riba.
6. Substance matches form. The most important pillar. The legal-form test must be paired with an economic-substance test. A Murābaḥah where the bank never genuinely owns the goods, or an Ijārah where the bank's exposure to asset risk is engineered to zero, passes form but fails substance.

How audit verdicts are formed

Each /audit entry walks the provider's documented contract structure through the six pillars above. The verdict is assigned by counting how many pillars the structure satisfies + how confident we are in our reading of the contract:

• Green — 6 of 6 pillars satisfied with high confidence based on publicly documented contracts or product disclosures.
• Yellow — 4 of 6 satisfied OR 5+ satisfied with significant interpretive ambiguity. Includes both "probably fine but worth scrutiny" and "structurally contested even among scholars".
• Red — 3 or fewer satisfied OR clear failure of the substance-vs-form test.

What we don't do: We don't grade based on a provider's marketing claims or Shariah board membership alone. A Shariah board is a positive signal but not a verdict. We attempt to read the actual contract or product disclosure where available, and we mark verdicts as lower-confidence when we can't.

The /ask AI synthesis prompt — published

Users on /ask interacting with the AI synthesis mode see summaries built by Claude from the corpus. The prompt that shapes those summaries is published below so users can judge whether the framing is what they want.

The full prompt + retrieval logic is in app/lib/ai-ask.ts in the public GitHub repository. The repository is open-source-spirit (we publish the source so the methodology is auditable; we ask you not to clone-and-deploy without scholarly review of the corpus).

Calculator assumptions — published

The five calculators on this site each make specific assumptions to produce point-estimate outputs. The assumptions are listed in each calculator's "Methodology" expandable section, and also catalogued here.

The calculators are market-aware: choosing a US, UK or Canada edition re-anchors the currency, medians and thresholds to that market. The rates and ratios (returns, appreciation, transaction-cost percentages) are assumptions that hold across editions. Rather than publish only the Australian numbers and describe the rest, the anchors every edition actually uses are listed here in full.

The per-market anchors, in full

Four figures are supplied by the site rather than entered by the reader — the downsize target, the cost of a home in a hijrah-realistic destination, the cash cost of an international move, and the household spending the hijrah cost-of-living saving is computed from. Each market has its own, each is a starting point the reader can overwrite with their own number, and they are the figures the engines actually run on:

Exit calculator (/exit)

• Halal equity returns (sell-and-rent strategy): 7% real annual. S&P Shariah long-term has averaged 7–9% nominal; 7% real is the conservative-realistic side.
• Property appreciation (do-nothing comparison): 2% real annual. AU residential has historically tracked 1–2% above inflation over multi-decade horizons.
• Transaction costs: 3.5% on sale (agent + legal + marketing) and 6.5% on purchase (transfer duty, conveyancing, registration, removals). Both are ratios, so they hold across editions. The purchase figure replaced an Australian 5% stamp duty plus a flat 8,000 removal allowance — a flat amount that was being re-symbolised into the reader’s currency without ever having been anchored there. Transfer duty varies by state and province, so substitute your own if it differs materially.
• Leaving the conventional loan: 3% of the outstanding balance as a fixed-rate break cost, capped at 2.88% of the market’s regional median, or 0.115% of it as discharge administration on a variable loan. The cap and the admin fee replaced a flat 15,000 and a flat 600 — Australian amounts charged to every edition and then re-symbolised, the last two in this engine. There is no per-market lender-fee figure we would stand behind, so rather than invent three they are stated against the one housing anchor every edition has, calibrated to reproduce the Australian amounts exactly. An admin fee does not genuinely scale with house prices; the ratio only keeps it in proportion to the market it is quoted in, and both charges are now disclosed on /exit with the instruction to substitute the figures on your own loan contract.
• Islamic finance premium: 1.5% effective rate over conventional. Real-world Australian quotes range 0.8–2.5%.
• Regional downsize target and hijrah destination target (Türkiye / Malaysia / Indonesia; UAE freehold and KSA typically higher): per-market, from the anchors table above.
• Hijrah cost-of-living saving: 35% of the household’s monthly spending excluding housing, accumulated over 10 years and not compounded. The rate is the same cross-edition ratio the halal housing calculator models; the base is the reader’s own figure, falling back to their market’s anchor above. This replaced a flat, unsourced 100,000 that was added identically for every household and every edition, and was the single largest term in that strategy’s ten-year figure. It assumes income survives the move; where it does not, the saving is not a gain.

Halal housing calculator (/tools/halal-housing)

• Halal equity returns: 6% real (more conservative than /exit's 7%; pre-purification estimate)
• Property appreciation: 1.5% real (slightly more conservative than /exit's 2%)
• Income growth: 1.5% real; rent growth: 1% real
• City medians: 2026 market anchors per edition; approximate, update annually

Zakat calculator (/tools/zakat)

• Zakat rate: 2.5% on zakatable wealth above nisāb threshold
• Nisāb thresholds: 87.48g gold OR 612.36g silver, user choice (silver-basis recommended by most contemporary scholars to widen the obligation)
• Super: conservative AAOIFI-aligned view (annual on current balance). Minority view (only on access) is documented but not the default.
• Equities: Method B — full market value treated as trading goods. Method A (zakat on underlying assets proportionally) is more accurate but operationally complex; results typically within 5–15%.

Mawārīth calculator (/tools/mawarith)

• Implements Qurʾān 4:11–12 + 4:176 + classical ʿaṣabah residue rule for common cases: spouse + sons + daughters + parents.
• Implements ʿawl (proportional reduction), radd (proportional return, Hanafi view excluding spouse), and ʿUmariyya case (spouse + both parents, no descendants).
• Routes complex cases (siblings, grandchildren via deceased son, multiple wives, named edge cases like Akdariyya / Mushtaraka / Mālikiyya) to a qualified faradi — the engine explicitly does NOT handle these.

Hijrah readiness (/tools/hijrah-readiness)

• Composite 0–100 score across 4 binary success constraints: income, family, capital, destination. Each dimension weighted evenly (25 points).
• Capital sufficiency: requires the destination property cost plus a post-move living runway plus the international move cost — all per-market (Australia A$50,000 runway, United States $35,000, United Kingdom £28,000, Canada C$45,000; move costs and destination property per the anchors table above).
• Scoring is heuristic and not peer-reviewed. The framework is based on documented hijrah patterns from AU/UK Muslim communities, not a published methodology.

Citation standards

Across all pages, citations follow these conventions:

• Qurʾān: surah:āyah (e.g. al-Baqarah 2:275). Live-fetched from quran.com when displayed in MDX.
• Hadith: collection + reference number + grading (e.g. Saḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 2766, Saḥīḥ). Where grading is contested, we note the contestation.
• Scholar quotes: tagged with trust level — "verified" (direct quote from published source with citation), "documented-position" (paraphrase of a position established across multiple talks/publications), or "secondary" (cited via another scholar's reference, not directly verified).
• Institutional fatāwā: resolution number + council + year when available (e.g. ECFR Resolution 2/4, 1999).

How stories are compiled

The 9+ stories on /stories are composite patterns, not individual case records. They are compiled from:

• Publicly documented testimonies in AU/UK Muslim community forums (anonymised + composited)
• Patterns documented in the writings of IFG, Practical Islamic Finance, MuslimMatters
• Operator's direct conversations with families who have completed an exit (with their permission, anonymised)

Each story includes a "Composite · pattern" tag and a sources line. Specific dollar figures and timelines are representative of the underlying pattern, not records of a single named family.

Update + correction policy

The site is a living document. When facts change (tax rates, property medians, provider products, scholarly positions), the content should change with them. When errors are found, they should be corrected publicly + transparently.

• Per-page review: every section page is re-reviewed quarterly. The next-review date is published in the page footer.
• Correction log: a public /corrections page (planned) will list every substantive correction made post-launch, with date + reason.
• How to report errors: contact via /colophon. We respond within 7 days and either revise or document why we believe the original was correct.

Last reviewed: 2026-05-27 · Methodology updates are published as the site matures.