The question for the Muslim world is no longer whether artificial intelligence will enter religious education. It already has. The more consequential question is: who will shape the knowledge, ethics and authority that AI delivers to the next generation of Muslims? Artificial intelligence, automation, digital communication, biotechnology and data-driven systems are transforming how people learn, work, communicate and make decisions. AI is no longer confined to laboratories or technology companies. It is now present in classrooms, universities, businesses, media, healthcare and increasingly in religious education. For Muslims, this technological transformation presents a challenge that is deeper than simply adopting new tools. How can Islamic intellectual heritage remain relevant in an age of algorithms without allowing technology to displace the human values that give knowledge its meaning?
Islamic civilization has historically placed a high value on knowledge, inquiry, scholarship and the investigation of the natural world. The challenge today is to bring that intellectual tradition into conversation with technologies that are changing the very way knowledge is produced, accessed and transmitted. In this context, the work of institutions such as Minhaj-ul-Quran International (MQI) and Minhaj University Lahore offers one example of an effort to connect Islamic scholarship with contemporary education and emerging technologies. But the larger issue extends far beyond any single institution: can the Muslim world become an active participant in shaping the AI age rather than merely a consumer of technology developed elsewhere?
Muslim scholars made important contributions to mathematics, medicine, astronomy, geography, philosophy and linguistics. The pursuit of knowledge was not understood simply as the accumulation of information. Scholarship was connected to questions of purpose, responsibility and the improvement of human life. That distinction has become particularly important in the age of generative AI. Artificial intelligence can retrieve enormous quantities of information, identify patterns and produce sophisticated language within seconds. Yet the ability to generate an answer is not the same as possessing knowledge, wisdom or moral judgment. An AI system can produce a convincing response while still being factually wrong. It can reproduce an interpretation without understanding its historical or spiritual context. It can present competing views with equal confidence even when their authority is not equal. This creates a fundamental challenge for religious education.
If a student asks an AI system a question about Islam, where does the answer come from? Which sources were used? How were they selected? What interpretation is being presented? Who verifies it? And what happens when an algorithm's answer conflicts with established scholarship? These are not merely technical questions. They are questions about authority. Islamic intellectual heritage can contribute an important principle to this debate: knowledge carries responsibility. Information becomes meaningful when it is accompanied by context, judgment, character and an awareness of its consequences. The engagement of Minhaj University Lahore with language technologies illustrates one possible way of bringing this tradition into the digital age.
Technology, when responsibly designed, can therefore become a bridge between the intellectual heritage of the past and the educational needs of the future.
At the First International Conference on Applied Linguistics and Language Technologies in 2025, Professor Dr. Hussain Mohi-ud-Din Qadri discussed connections between classical Islamic scholarly practices and contemporary technologies, including digital annotation, corpus mapping, computational analysis and AI-driven tools. One particularly interesting connection is with the classical tradition of hashiya, scholarly commentary and marginalia that allowed generations of scholars to analyse, debate and expand upon existing texts. Digital technology offers new possibilities for extending aspects of this intellectual practice. Large collections of Arabic, Urdu and other historical texts can be digitised, indexed and searched. Researchers can use computational tools to identify linguistic patterns, compare manuscripts and examine relationships between texts that would previously have required years of manual work. Such technologies do not make scholarship unnecessary. They can make scholarship more powerful. This distinction matters.
The purpose of AI should not be to replace the scholar but to expand the scholar's capacity. A researcher examining centuries-old manuscripts may use AI to locate references across thousands of pages. A language student may use computational tools to study classical Arabic or Urdu. An educator may use intelligent systems to personalise learning while retaining the teacher's role as mentor, interpreter and guide. Technology, when responsibly designed, can therefore become a bridge between the intellectual heritage of the past and the educational needs of the future. The greatest challenge may arise when AI moves from general education into matters of faith.
Artificial intelligence can potentially assist with Qur'anic recitation, memorisation, pronunciation, translation and access to scholarly material. It can make vast libraries more accessible and help students navigate complex bodies of knowledge. But religious knowledge is not simply a database problem. Accuracy matters, but so do authenticity, interpretation, context and authority. A mistake in a recommendation for a restaurant is inconsequential. A fabricated religious quotation or an incorrect explanation of a theological principle can have consequences far beyond a technical error. This makes verification essential.
AI-generated religious information should therefore be approached differently from ordinary search results. Users need to know what sources an AI system is drawing upon, how those sources were evaluated and when consultation with qualified scholars is necessary. There is also a danger of excessive dependence. If students begin treating AI as an unquestionable authority, the technology could weaken precisely the human intellectual engagement that education is meant to cultivate. The appropriate model is therefore not AI instead of the teacher, but AI alongside the teacher.
The arrival of AI does not require humanity to abandon its values. Nor does preserving tradition require society to reject every technological development. The more constructive path lies between these extremes: engage with modernity without surrendering judgment to it. The Prophetic model of moderation offers a useful framework for thinking about this challenge. Social transformation was accompanied by an emphasis on justice, dignity, consultation, responsibility and moral conduct. Progress was not valuable merely because it was new; its value was connected to how it served human beings.
The Muslim world has an opportunity to approach artificial intelligence with greater ambition. AI can help preserve manuscripts, organise libraries, analyse languages, translate texts and expand access to educational resources. It can help scholars examine enormous bodies of material that would be difficult to process manually. It can give students new ways to learn and researchers new ways to investigate the past. But Muslims should not limit themselves to becoming users of technologies designed elsewhere.
There is a need for Muslim scholars, educators, linguists, technologists and entrepreneurs to work together. Religious scholars need greater technological literacy, while technologists working on Islamic applications need a deeper understanding of the intellectual and ethical traditions they are attempting to encode. This is where initiatives such as those emerging from Minhaj University Lahore are potentially significant. Their importance lies not simply in introducing AI into educational programmes, but in opening a broader conversation about how classical scholarship can interact with computational methods. The objective should be neither to turn religious scholarship into an algorithm nor to place technology outside the boundaries of religious thought. It should be to develop a relationship in which each contributes what the other lacks. The task for the coming decades is therefore not to choose between the wisdom of the past and the technologies of the future. It is to bring them into meaningful dialogue.