Selected resources on Muslim and Islamic engagement with artificial intelligence, a literature that has taken shape only in the last few years and is still forming. The entries address what AI means for human distinctiveness, moral agency and religious authority, and draw on kalām, Sufi metaphysics and the objectives of Islamic law. They do not agree: some treat AI as a metaphysical threat, while others hold that machine consciousness poses no difficulty for classical theism. Primarily in English, with French-language material from Al-Azhar.
From the Project
Dr Muhammad Sami, in conversation with Dr Maan Al Dabbagh, Beyond the Code: AI Ethics and the Islamic Tradition
The first conversation in the project’s podcast series, recorded with a researcher trained at Oxford and now based at Tabah Foundation in Cairo, whose work moved from Islamic philosophy into the ethics of AI. Dr Sami argues that faith traditions are largely absent from the discourse shaping AI ethics, not because they lack resources but because non-European traditions are rarely mined for philosophical ideas in the way Plato, Aristotle or Aquinas are. The centre of the conversation is a five-level framework running from the development of technology, through its social effects, to the normative judgements we make about those effects and finally to the philosophical commitments generating those judgements — a structure he traces to the classical hierarchy of the sciences. He argues that the sharīʿa’s distinctive contribution is fixity: an anchoring of value at a moment when preferences and beliefs can be altered at the click of a button.
Academic Works (Books, Chapters, Articles, Reports)
1. Yaqub Chaudhary, “The Future and the Artificial: An Islamic Perspective”, Future of Life Institute, 26 September 2024. (Open access) https://futureoflife.org/religion/the-future-and-the-artificial-an-islamic-perspective/
Companion chapter (Cambridge University Press, 2024) : https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-religion-and-artificial-intelligence/islam-and-artificial-intelligence/7E260B69CF24578962E1191C9BD8BC7E
An Islamic theological argument published by an existential-risk institution, as part of the Future of Life Institute’s project on the perspectives of traditional religions. Chaudhary likens AI developers to Pharaoh’s sorcerers, who cast the illusion of life into inanimate objects while concealing the apparatus behind it, and large language models to the golden calf of al-Sāmirī, formed by melting down a people’s own treasures. His central claim is that a positive Islamic future preserves the right to refuse AI integration without penalty. His peer-reviewed chapter in the Cambridge Companion develops the same argument, setting the “technological imaginary” of AI against a worldview anchored in tawḥīd.
2. Yusuf Çelik, “Answering Divine Love: Human Distinctiveness in the Light of Islam and Artificial Superintelligence”, Sophia, 62:4, 2023, pp. 679–696. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00977-w
The item that engages artificial superintelligence most directly. Çelik notes that traditional exegesis tended to locate human uniqueness in knowledge and stewardship – capacities a superintelligence would plausibly surpass, which makes those markers brittle. Drawing on Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 1240), he argues that human distinctiveness lies instead in the capacity to respond to divine love through vulnerability, moral struggle and the imitation of divine virtues. The significance for this library is that it supplies a non-computational measure of human worth: if human value is not a function of cognitive supremacy, being surpassed intellectually is not in itself an existential defeat.
3. Nidhal Guessoum, “Kalām, Humans and AI: Reason(ing), Creation/Creativity, and Agency”, Religions, 17:6, 2026, art. 703. (Open access) https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/17/6/703
The only item working systematically through the classical theological schools. Guessoum surveys Muʿtazilite, Ashʿarite and Māturīdite positions on reason, divine creation and human action, then argues that AI satisfies none of the theological conditions for knowledge, creation or agency: it may display origination but lacks reason, soul, spirit and intention. He distinguishes carefully between narrow AI and artificial general intelligence, warning that much commentary conflates the two, and identifies “cognitive outsourcing” – the gradual delegation of reasoning itself to machines – as a spiritual danger rather than merely an epistemic inconvenience.
4. Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour, “Artificial Intelligence and the Islamic Theology of Technology: From ‘Means’ to ‘Meanings’ and from ‘Minds’ to ‘Hearts’”, Religions, 16:6, 2025, art. 796. (Open access) https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16060796
Very useful entry point, since it both surveys the emerging field and advances its own argument. Abdelnour contends that Muslim responses have focused too narrowly on the mind and should turn to the qalb, the heart, as the seat of moral discernment. He names the specific theological danger as the attribution of ultimate moral authority to opaque algorithms, and diagnoses an age in which technical means have outrun our capacity to sustain meanings. He proposes ijtihād, maṣlaḥah mursalah and sadd al-dharā’iʿ, the last being the closest thing in classical legal theory to a precautionary principle.
5. Ezieddin Elmahjub, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Islamic Ethics: Towards Pluralist Ethical Benchmarking for AI”, Philosophy & Technology, 36:4, 2023, art. 73. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-023-00668-x
Published commentary by Amana Raquib : https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-023-00677-w
The item most directly aligned with the project’s founding contention. Elmahjub observes that AI ethics discourse has been overwhelmingly Western and Eurocentric at precisely the moment when global norms and benchmarks are being fixed, and draws on both textual and non-textual Islamic sources, with maṣlaḥa as the normative guide, to argue for genuinely pluralist ethical benchmarking. Its bearing on catastrophic risk is structural rather than topical: whose values are encoded into powerful systems, and by what authority, is a question of alignment and governance rather than merely of fairness. Amana Raquib’s published commentary extends and complicates the argument.
6. (Fr) « La Fatwa à l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle », Al-Azhar Observatory, French edition, 11 September 2025. https://azhar.eg/observer-fr/details/ArtMID/1154/ArticleID/95737/La-Fatwa-224-l232re-de-lintelligence-artificielle
Une publication de l’observatoire officiel d’al-Azhar, en français, consacrée à la menace épistémologique du « mufti numérique ». Le texte distingue l’accumulation du savoir (jamʿ al-ʿilm), dont la machine est capable, de la compréhension juridique contextuelle (fiqh al-ʿilm) que doit posséder le savant, et soutient que l’émission d’une fatwa exige une capacité de conceptualisation, un raisonnement analogique, une intelligence des conséquences (fiqh al-maʾalāt) et une piété scrupuleuse dont la machine est ontologiquement dépourvue. L’IA peut servir d’auxiliaire pédagogique, mais s’y fier pour le jugement normatif risque d’atrophier la capacité jurisprudentielle et d’éroder les chaînes de transmission (isnād) qui protègent le droit islamique. Réserve : l’attribution du texte à son auteur reste à confirmer auprès de l’observatoire avant publication.
7. David Edmonds, ed., AI Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. (General foundational work – not Islam-specific) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ai-morality-9780198876434
Twenty commissioned chapters by leading philosophers on the moral dilemmas artificial intelligence poses across defence, health, law, work, policing, politics and manipulation, the environment, and identity. Included for essential background because it is deliberately accessible – short chapters written for non-specialists – and because its coverage maps closely onto the concerns of this theme, with an opening chapter on autonomous weapons and human rights and later chapters on algorithmic nudging and the erosion of human agency. Readers wanting the canonical existential-risk statements should consult Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence (2014) and Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible (2019).
Multimedia (Lectures, Conferences – Video/Podcast)
8.Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, Thriving Amidst Existential Risks, keynote address, Cambridge Forum 2025, 3–4 September 2025.
Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWVqw3JP3_Q
A senior traditionally-trained scholar addressing existential risk directly, and naming its technological drivers explicitly. Drawing on literature, philosophy and Qur’anic wisdom, the Dean of Cambridge Muslim College identifies six symptoms of the present condition: the Biopause, or a decline in valuing human continuity; the Meaning Drought; Nature Deficiency Syndrome; the threat of artificial general intelligence; the Wojak Complex of digital-age despair; and the paralysis of fatalism and apathy. Delivered to an audience of technologists, academics and policymakers rather than to a Muslim audience, it is an unusual instance of Islamic scholarship entering the risk conversation on its own terms.
9. Waleed Kadous, The Future of Muslim AI?, The Thinking Muslim podcast, episode 302, 2025.
Podcast : https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/podcast/waleedkadous
Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgCfUqlsKbQ
A long-form conversation with a senior AI practitioner, formerly of Google and Uber, asking whether Muslims are prepared for what is coming. It covers the future of work, the concentration of power in a small number of technology firms, the question of who controls these systems and whether they can be aligned with moral principles at all, and the prospect of systems shaped by Islamic values. Its value lies in pairing technical credibility with an explicitly Muslim framing, and in reaching the political and structural dimensions of AI risk that the more theological items on this list do not.
