Every era meets new tools with a familiar unease. Islamicity’s recent reflection on artificial intelligence places today’s debate within a long historical pattern: societies have always been unsettled by instruments that expand access to knowledge. Writing once threatened oral memory, printing disrupted religious gatekeeping, and now AI revives old questions about who is allowed to speak, interpret, and ask.
Rather than treating AI as an unprecedented rupture, the article frames it as another “mirror”, vast, fast, and unsettling, reflecting human thought back to itself. The anxiety, it argues, is not really about technology producing error. Error has always existed. What has changed is who can now examine it.
When Tools Are Mistaken for Authority
One of the article’s central arguments rests on a careful distinction between tools and authority. Artificial intelligence emphasizes that it claims no scholarship, piety, lineage, or ijtihād. It does not issue verdicts, swear by God, or claim moral standing. It retrieves, compares, and synthesizes information only when prompted.
To fear AI as a religious authority, the piece suggests, is a category mistake. It is akin to fearing a book for containing words or a library for holding multiple voices. The danger lies not in the tool itself, but in confusing access to information with the authority to command belief.
Lessons from Classical Scholarship
Islamicity strengthens its case by turning to Islamic intellectual history. Classical scholars worked in environments far more fragile than today’s digital space. Manuscripts were miscopied, texts abridged without notice, and narrations misattributed across generations.
Yet scholars did not respond by suppressing books or avoiding disagreement. Instead, they cultivated intellectual discipline, teaching how to weigh evidence, compare opinions, and sit with uncertainty responsibly. Error was confronted through engagement, not evasion.
Error, Power, and Selective Fear
The article pushes further by addressing an uncomfortable truth: error has never been exclusive to tools. Scholars themselves have erred sometimes innocently, sometimes tragically, and at times in the service of power. History records mistaken and even cruel fatwas, defended with confidence and eloquence.
Yet Islam did not respond by silencing scholars altogether. It demanded evidence, accountability, and reasoned critique. From this perspective, singling out AI as uniquely dangerous begins to look less like protection of truth and more like protection of comfort.
Mirrors That Disrupt Certainty
One of the article’s more provocative claims is that AI, when used responsibly, can expose distortions rather than create them. It can place interpretations side by side, reveal disagreement where certainty was falsely asserted, and return marginalized voices to the conversation.
AI does not enforce a school, a sect, or a temperament. It mirrors what already exists. And mirrors, by their nature, make people uneasy, especially those accustomed to speaking without being questioned.
The Qur’anic Ethic of Inquiry
Underlying the piece is a clear Qur’anic ethic. The Qur’an does not fear questions; it warns against arrogance, negligence, and the refusal to think. Again and again, it asks: Will you not reason? Will you not consider?
Islamicity acknowledges that warning against blind reliance, including reliance on AI, is wise. Verification is ethical. But discouraging engagement altogether confuses protection with paralysis. Knowledge has never been preserved by locking doors, but by teaching people how to walk carefully through open ones.
Responsibility Where It Has Always Been
The article closes by returning responsibility to its proper place. Artificial intelligence is not a guide, nor a guardian of truth. It is a wide, imperfect lens, shaped by those who look through it. The moral burden has never belonged to tools, but to human judgment.
Rather than fearing new mirrors, the task ahead is to teach individuals and communities how to look into them without losing balance. The future of faith, Islamicity reminds us, has never depended on fewer questions, only on better ones.
This piece draws on and reflects themes from Islamicity’s discussion on artificial intelligence, truth, and authority.
Find the full dialogue and article of Islamicity here.
