Is BABA halal in 2026?

The security being screened is the NYSE-listed American Depositary Receipt, not the Hong Kong line. That distinction matters when you compare verdicts, because a screener working from a different listing, a different reporting currency or a different fiscal period can be reading a genuinely different set of numbers for the same business. HalalScreener screens US-listed stocks, ETFs and crypto (10,000+), plus major global companies via their US ADRs, and Alibaba is screened through that ADR.

AAOIFI Shari'a Standard No. 21 sets two gates. The first is the business itself, and Alibaba passes it: Taobao, Tmall, AliExpress, Cainiao logistics and Alibaba Cloud are permissible lines of business, and the qualitative screen returned a pass. The second gate is quantitative, and it has three parts: interest-bearing debt must stay under 30% of market capitalization, interest-bearing deposits and securities under 30% of market capitalization, and income from impermissible sources under 5% of revenue. Alibaba clears the first two comfortably and fails the third.

The failing line is interest and investment income measured against total revenue. Alibaba carries one of the largest cash and investment portfolios of any listed company, and the return on that portfolio is what crosses the 5% ceiling. This is the mechanical reason the major screeners split on Alibaba rather than a disagreement about the business: a screen that measures impermissible income against market capitalization instead of revenue, or that counts only interest and excludes investment returns, will land under its own threshold and report the stock as compliant. Neither side is inventing numbers. They are dividing by different things, and AAOIFI's standard divides by revenue.

For a holder, a failed screen is not something purification repairs. Purification applies to the small impermissible share of income inside a company that has passed both gates; it is not a mechanism for converting a non-compliant holding into a compliant one. The mainstream position across both the Sunni and the Ja'fari schools is to exit a holding that fails the screens, giving away the portion attributable to impermissible income without seeking reward for it, and those who follow Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani or another living authority should put the timing and the calculation to their own marja'. We screen against a published standard; we do not issue fatwa, and a verdict here is a screening result rather than a ruling on your particular holding.

This verdict is not permanent. Alibaba's ratios move with its market capitalization, its cash position and each new filing, and the impermissible income line in particular is sensitive to both the size of the investment portfolio and the revenue base it is measured against. The stock page carries the current screen and re-screens daily, so check the live figure before acting on any dated article, including this one.