Artificial Intelligence and Islam: Opportunities and Challenges in Islamic Sciences and Religious Fields

According to Taghrib News Agency, Abdullah Naruei, a Sunni religious scholar and director of the Khatam al-Nabiyyin Institute, wrote in a note:
Among the great blessings of God to humans in this world is the blessing of intellect; a gift that empowers humans to progress in life, confront hardships, and improve their living standards and relationships with all elements of existence. Also, the blessing of subjugating creatures for humans, based on knowledge, evidence, and reason, with brilliant and observable results, is another divine favor.
Since the world entered the digital revolution era, creativity and innovation have been rapidly causing great transformations in human life and ways of living and thinking—transformations unlike anything seen before. To the extent that sometimes people feel as if they are in an amazing dream because of what AI and electronic programming have brought to all fields.
This transformation is mainly due to AI’s simulation of human intelligence; a simulation that astonishes human reason in almost all matters, including future prediction, and raises concerns that it might go beyond human control and threaten humanity’s future. AI, as a result of digital and technological revolutions, especially in deep learning and complex pattern analysis of textual data and generating predictions similar to human thinking, has made tremendous progress.
Some consider this progress a scientific achievement beyond expectations that promises a better future for humanity, since the foremost aspect of any invention and innovation is its benefits and practical uses. Conversely, others believe these advances may harm human dignity, as humans become, in this process, somewhat like objects.
The reason is that the institutions producing and controlling AI have no goal other than rapid profit and building octopus-like empires that accumulate legendary wealth. Thus, AI is seen as a threat to humanity and might eventually almost entirely eliminate the human role, leading the world into a “post-human” era. Between these optimistic and pessimistic views, there are other perspectives that have not yet fully grasped the magnitude of this challenge and refrain from definitive judgment on AI, instead focusing on its impact within specific fields where expert analysis is applicable.
AI has been employed in fields such as medicine, industry, economy, education, and so forth. It is also used in Islamic jurisprudence, law, and judiciary, though its application in these areas has raised concerns as well.
The significance of AI in Islamic sciences, especially with the expansion of digital data and the need to analyze them for extracting information and viewpoints, has increased. This importance grows further when positive outcomes in issuing rulings and supporting the jurisprudential deduction process are observed.
It seems necessary to provide supplementary discussions on this topic and examine the areas of AI application in Islamic sciences, as well as its benefits and harms. Additionally, its importance in data analysis for strengthening the objectives of Sharia and assisting in resolving new jurisprudential issues while observing ethical principles should be stated. A critical point is that jurisprudential rulings must be linked to the objectives of Sharia.
In the realm of Quranic studies and interpretation, AI can reduce effort and facilitate the path to finding the relevant verse and its interpretation anywhere in the Quran. This application is a great service to thematic Quranic exegesis, making humans less dependent on voluminous interpretative sources.
Of course, challenges exist in this path, both in correctly understanding the religious text and verifying its authenticity. Despite the services AI provides in jurisprudential research, a key question remains: can AI be regarded as having jurisprudential mastery, and can it be relied upon in issuing fatwas instead of jurists and jurisprudential councils? Use of AI technology in issuing fatwas, despite its advantages, could be dangerous if other necessary conditions for fatwa—such as deep understanding and proper correlation with realities, events, and predictions—are not met.
This issue is also evident in some practical applications like disease diagnosis and enhancing human biological capabilities, such as treating aging, where challenges have emerged. On the other hand, judicial systems have begun employing AI in litigation processes, encompassing nearly all stages of legal proceedings.
While some enthusiastically support full or partial use of AI, others express concerns because it might affect impartial justice and respect for individuals’ privacy.
Though this technology has improved performance in some areas, reliance on its technology can undermine the principle of equal opportunity between parties in litigation—something that complicates achieving ideal justice. Despite its importance in managing trial duration, the challenges, risks, and considerations of using AI algorithms in judicial time management should be addressed. One might also question the legal competence of robots and their legal personality.
Furthermore, civil liability of robots in case of errors can be examined, and efforts to address such errors can be explained from a jurisprudential perspective—similar to what has been done for medical errors. These issues are among emerging jurisprudential novelties requiring new jurisprudential ijtihad. Another important area to investigate is the application of AI in Islamic jurisprudence. Here, sets of intelligent software and systems like ChatGPT are used to quickly answer questions, yielding surprising results, although full reliance is not recommended since their sources are not always trustworthy.
The note also discusses blockchain technology and its use for efficient management and financing of religious endowments (waqf), achieving good governance by leveraging modern digital technologies. Inspired by Malaysia’s experience, the researcher studies the legitimacy, appropriateness, and success rate of this method in strengthening the developmental role of waqf in society.
Furthermore, new methods for information retrieval and classification, and their application in Quranic search engines—considering syntactic and semantic features of Quranic vocabulary and Arabic language characteristics—allow more precise searches according to researchers’ needs.
This may also be relevant in prophetic hadith research, where a dialogue-based AI robot powered by AI and other artificial networks and operating on a limited database has been developed. This robot aims to assist researchers at various levels and widely disseminate the Prophetic tradition, connecting people to it via dedicated applications.
Full details require further knowledge and comprehensive effort. All these studies introduce the latest AI achievements serving the various fields mentioned, while outlining existing challenges and concerns to interested scholars. Hence, ignorance or lack of knowledge about these developments is no longer justifiable for specialized researchers.