Where is Islam on AI?
Decentralized faiths are struggling. Waleed Kadous has answers.
Religious engagement with AI has largely been dominated by Christian voices. That’s understandable: the AI conversation is centered in the United States, and many Christian traditions possess highly centralized institutions capable of producing coordinated responses.
Islam presents a different case. With more than a billion adherents spread across vastly different societies—and no central authority capable of speaking for all Muslims—the Islamic response to AI is emerging in a decentralized fashion. Yet the stakes are enormous. AI will affect Muslim-majority societies just as profoundly as anywhere else, raising questions about religious authority, economic justice, warfare, community, and cultural sovereignty.
To explore these issues, I spoke with Waleed Kadous. A longtime AI researcher who has worked at Google, Uber, Canva, and Anyscale, Kadous has also spent decades studying Islam. Today, he’s one of the leading voices working at the intersection of faith and artificial intelligence.
Inside the episode:
[0:00] How an AI researcher became an Islamic AI scholar
[1:07] What is Ansari?
[3:07] AI as fitna: a test for individuals and civilization, with challenges of wealth distribution
[5:50] The decentralized challenge of Islamic AI governance
[7:35] Can AI help write a khutbah / sermon?
[12:16] Islamic sources on AI: more theological or legal?
[15:52] Islamic chains of transmission, does AI scramble them?
[18:53] Writing as technology and AI as writing
[20:05] Islamic AI benchmarks measuring legal accuracy, source fidelity, and hallucination rates
[24:29] Could an AI become an imam?
[27:05] AI answering questions of faith: worth the risk?
[28:40] AI + Islam’s late adoption of the printing press
[31:04] Advocating for early Muslim adoption of AI
[33:19] AI & warfare in Gaza and Iran
[36:40] The future AI divide may be less about religion vs secularism than meaning vs materialism
Organizations and links
Follow Waleed Kadous
Medium: https://waleedk.medium.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waleedkadous
Our partners
Belief in the Future is produced in partnership with the Faith Family Technology Network and is a production of Sinai and Synapses. Funding for Belief in the Future comes from the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
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