# SAHM: A Benchmark for Arabic Financial and Shari'ah-Compliant Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10063/) (2019)
- [Jais and Jais-chat: Arabic-Centric Foundation and Instruction-Tuned Open Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16149/) (2023)
- [Fanar: An Arabic-Centric Multimodal Generative AI Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13944/) (2025)
- [ALLaM: Large Language Models for Arabic and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15390/) (2024)
- [Plutus: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Low-Resource Greek Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18772/) (2025)
- [FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02515/) (2025)
- [MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14028/) (2025)
- [AIN: The Arabic INclusive Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00094/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Overview of FinMMEval 2026 Task 1: Multilingual Financial Multiple-Choice Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19856/) (2026)
- [Overview of FinMMEval 2026 Task 2: Multilingual Financial Short-Answer Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19867/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

English financial NLP has advanced rapidly through benchmarks targeting earnings analysis, market sentiment, tabular reasoning, and financial question answering, yet Arabic financial NLP remains virtually nonexistent, despite 422 million speakers, 4.9 trillion in Gulf sovereign wealth, and a 4-5 trillion Islamic finance industry requiring specialized Shari'ah compliance over instruments like sukuk, murabaha, and takaful. We introduce Sahm, the first Arabic financial benchmark spanning seven tasks: AAOIFI standards QA, fatwa-based QA/MCQ, accounting and business exams, financial sentiment analysis, extractive summarization, and event-cause reasoning, comprising 14,380 expert-verified instances from authentic regulatory, juristic, and corporate sources. Evaluating 20 LLMs, we find Arabic fluency does not imply financial reasoning: models achieving 91% on recognition tasks drop sharply on generation, and event-cause reasoning exposes the widest performance gap (1.89-9.84/10). We release the benchmark and dataset to support trustworthy Arabic financial assistants.