Can Algorithms Shape Belief? Religion, AI, and Authority in the Muslim World
By Ayesha Tauqeer
It was Ramadan 2025, and a worshipper at the Grand Mosque in Mecca had a question about her prayer. She did not approach a scholar seated in the traditional circle of learning. She walked up to a sleek, four-wheeled robot named Manara, Arabic for “beacon,” and asked it instead.
Saudi Arabia had unveiled the Manara Robot at Islam’s holiest site, designed to answer Sharia-related questions in eleven languages, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Hausa, and more, drawing on an integrated, pre-verified database of religious rulings. For questions beyond its database, it offers a video call with a live scholar. The robot is draped in Islamic decorative motifs, its 21-inch touchscreen a fusion of heritage and high technology.
That scene at the Haram quietly highlights a transformation spreading across the Muslim world.
For over a millennium, Islamic religious authority has flowed through a recognizable chain: the Quran, the Hadith, qualified jurists trained in ijtihad (independent legal reasoning), and the community that trusts them. A fatwa was never simply an answer; it was the product of a living scholar’s moral insight, contextual judgment, and spiritual accountability.
Artificial intelligence threatens to flatten that chain. Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta launched FatwaPro in 2022, a smart app fielding religious inquiries from Muslims in the West. By 2024, it had handled 6,740 fatwas, over half issued that year alone. More than sixty percent of questions touched on marriage, divorce, and gender roles. Dubai’s “Virtual Ifta” service, launched as far back as 2019, was one of the first AI-based platforms to issue Islamic rulings via chat. Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest user of ChatGPT, has seen millions of Muslims turn to AI for religious guidance before ever reaching a human scholar.
Behind every AI fatwa is a dataset, and behind every dataset is a set of choices about what counts as authoritative Islam. Those choices are made by engineers, governments, and institutions, not by open scholarly consensus.
A 2025 evaluation of Islamic-oriented chatbots found significant methodological failures, including misattributed Quranic verses, fabricated hadith references, and a near-total absence of consistent juristic frameworks. Responses, critics note, “reflect algorithmic biases and fail to address the nuanced differences in individual circumstances that are often decisive in Islamic rulings.”
This is not a technical glitch. It is a structural problem. Scholars at the International Islamic Fiqh Academy and Al-Azhar have argued unanimously that AI cannot replace a faqih, a human jurist, because issuing a fatwa requires taqwa (God-consciousness), waqi’ (situational understanding), and a life of accumulated moral formation. An algorithm has none of these.
As one Islamic law blog noted, AI raises “provocative questions about the nature of religious authority and the legitimacy of AI-generated fatwas”, questions that touch the very architecture of how Muslims relate to God, community, and law.
For societies that already concentrate religious authority in state institutions, AI adds another layer of control, one that is invisible, scalable, and difficult to contest.
When a government-backed body pre-loads an AI with approved rulings, the algorithm becomes a tool of ideological consolidation. Dissenting interpretations are not banned; they are simply absent from the database. As researchers have observed, if AI platforms erode public trust in living scholars, they may gradually eliminate the very figures who historically served as buffers between state power and individual conscience.
Independent ulama have long been the Muslim world’s quiet check on political authority. Replace them with a robot trained on state-approved data, and that check disappears, not by decree, but by default.
The worshipper in Mecca who approached the Manara Robot was not surrendering her faith. She was seeking convenience. But the question of whose knowledge shapes that machine and whether she is free to seek an answer from somewhere else entirely is a question about liberty as much as theology.
Algorithms cannot yet issue fatwas. But they are already shaping which questions get asked, which answers feel authoritative, and which voices disappear from the conversation. That is power. And in the Muslim world, as everywhere, power without accountability is its own kind of danger.