Questions and answers

No. Sharia Check reads the wording of your documents and compares it with published AAOIFI Shari’ah Standards and common UK practice. It does not know what your provider’s Sharia board decided, or why, and boards often approve UK-specific features on grounds such as necessity or local law. Use the report to ask better questions of your provider, a scholar you trust, and your solicitor or mortgage adviser.

Everything your provider has given you for the plan, ideally as one file: the home purchase plan or co-ownership (musharaka) agreement, the lease or ijara agreement, any trust deed, the promise or undertaking to purchase, the general terms and conditions, the tariff of charges and your offer letter. Some findings, like a partnership clause and a shortfall clause, only show up when both documents are in the pack. PDFs exported from Word or downloaded from the provider work best. Scanned pages (photos of paper) cannot be read yet.

It is built for UK home purchase plans of any provider, whether the structure is diminishing musharaka with ijara (the most common), ijara on its own, or murabaha. It reads either style of drafting: “you” and “we”, or “the Customer” and “the Bank”. It has been tuned on real UK provider wording, but every pack is different, so check the clause text shown next to each flag.

About a minute for a short pack and up to seven or eight minutes for a long one; a 60-page set of terms takes about seven. Every clause is tested on our own server rather than sent to a large AI service, which keeps your documents private but takes a little longer. If several people are checking packs at once you will see your place in the queue.

Red: the wording likely conflicts with an AAOIFI standard, for example a late-payment charge the financier keeps, or a clause that makes you cover the financier’s losses in a partnership.

Amber: a departure from the standard that is common in UK plans, or something worth asking about, such as rent linked to the Bank of England base rate or you paying all the buildings insurance.

Green: the clause looks consistent with the standard, or none of the tests we ran found an issue. Green is not a guarantee: it means we did not find a problem with the tests we have.

It is the probability the model gave to the finding that decided the flag. For a red or amber flag, 90% means the model was quite sure the clause says what the test describes; 55% means it is borderline and worth reading yourself. For a green clause with no issues it shows how confident we are that none of the issue tests apply. Probabilities from a model are not perfectly calibrated, so treat them as a guide to where to look first.

Providers’ Sharia boards approve their products, and many features of UK plans are widely accepted. Amber means the clause departs from what the AAOIFI standard describes, not that the product is invalid. Typical examples are rent benchmarked to an interest rate, the customer paying all buildings insurance and structural repairs on a home the bank part-owns, and percentage early settlement charges. The report gives you the question to ask so your provider can explain its board’s view.

Nobody. Your file is sent over an encrypted connection to our server in Manchester, held in memory while it is checked, and never written to disk. The model that reads it runs on that server; your document is not sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or any other AI company. The report is deleted two hours after it is ready. There is no account, and we do not use tracking cookies.

Download it as CSV (opens in Excel or Numbers) or JSON, or use Print to save it as a PDF. Reports are deleted from our server two hours after they are ready, and the link stops working after that.

AAOIFI’s Shari’ah Standards are the most widely used reference for Islamic financial institutions and are adopted or referenced by regulators in many countries. The UK has no single Sharia authority, so providers rely on their own boards. Measuring every pack against the same published standard gives you a consistent baseline to compare providers and to frame your questions.

Mainly SS3 (Default in Payment by a Debtor), SS9 (Ijarah), and SS12 (Sharikah/Musharakah, including diminishing musharaka), with SS5 (Guarantees), SS26 (Islamic Insurance), SS31 (Gharar) and SS49 (Unilateral and Bilateral Promise) where relevant. A few features are also labelled as common UK practice. The methodology page lists every test and the standard behind it.