Shariah screening
Caravan tags instruments and funds with a shariah_compliant flag and lets a user narrow any catalog to screened-compliant instruments. This page explains what that is — and what it is not.
What the screen is
A shariah screen is a published, rules-based filter applied by a screening provider: it excludes instruments whose business activity or financial ratios fall outside shariah guidelines, and (for fixed income) covers shariah-structured instruments such as sukuk. The result is a yes/no tag, shariah_compliant, on each instrument, fund, and index (is_shariah).
How to use it
Pass ?shariah=true to a catalog endpoint to restrict the list to compliant instruments:
The alphabetical ordering is preserved inside the filtered set — the filter narrows the universe, it does not re-rank it. The platform can also enforce the screen as a hard gate: an order on a non-compliant instrument for a shariah-restricted investor is rejected with SHARIAH_RESTRICTED (see Orders).
What it is not
The screen is a descriptive universe filter on a provider tag — it states a fact about each instrument. It is not advice, not a recommendation, and not a quality ranking. A compliant instrument is not "better"; it simply passes the screen. Sukuk reuse the same fixed-income mechanics as bonds — they are screened, shariah-structured debt, not a separate or preferred asset class.
Compliance is a property the user can filter on, decided by the screening provider. It changes which instruments appear, never the order or any notion of merit — the neutrality contract holds inside the filtered set.