AI Tools Are Transforming Muslim Worship. Religious Scholars Are Conflicted

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Tarique Kazi, a 32-year-old teacher in Houston, used to recite the Quran with his mother. He teaches hifdh, the practice of memorizing the Quran to strengthen one’s faith. Kazi deeply valued those moments with his mother, finding them incredibly special. “I always looked forward to it,” he told TIME, “especially my mom giving me feedback and letting me know how I was doing.”

In 2022, Kazi’s mother passed away after battling stomach cancer. The next Ramadan, he realized he no longer had anyone he trusted to listen to his prayers – specifically, the longer nighttime prayers called taraweeh – and correct any mistakes he might make. That’s when he started using AI to help.

Since his mother passed away, Kazi has used Tarteel, an AI app that specializes in the Quran, to help him with his recitations. The app listens as he reads and immediately points out any mistakes in his pronunciation. “It’s really good at identifying exactly which vowel sound I mispronounced,” Kazi explains. “It’s been especially helpful for me since I no longer have someone to practice with and get feedback from.”

Tarteel, an AI-powered Quran learning app, is now widely used in mosques globally. This Ramadan, it helped people engage with the Quran for over six million hours in more than 180 countries. This highlights a growing trend: the integration of AI into Muslim religious life. Imams are using AI to craft sermons, students are utilizing it to aid Quran memorization, and many Muslims are turning to AI chatbots for guidance. According to Waleed Kadous, founder of the Muslim AI ethics organization IASER, when used properly, these tools can significantly deepen people’s understanding of their faith.

AI is raising concerns about its impact on religion, particularly among Muslims. Some people worry that popular AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude might be encouraging users to adopt more individualistic, Western beliefs, potentially distancing them from their communities and religious guides. This concern led religious leaders in Egypt to prohibit the use of AI for interpreting the Quran earlier this year.

As someone who deeply values my faith, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and how it’s changing things. It definitely offers some amazing new tools, but I worry about losing the personal connection to my religion – that feeling of community and shared experience that’s been so central to Islam, and faiths around the world, for centuries. It’s a real balancing act trying to embrace the benefits without sacrificing what makes my faith meaningful.

Kazi hopes people will maintain a personal connection when engaging with the Quran, even as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent. He believes it’s crucial to limit AI’s influence on something so important to their faith, for their own well-being.

Seeking answers from Muslim AI tools

Tarteel began as a personal project for Muslim tech experts, even before the recent surge in artificial intelligence. In 2019, Mohamed Moussa, a Canadian technologist, realized he wasn’t connecting with the Quran, a sacred text carefully preserved in its original Arabic for 1,400 years. In Islam, memorizing the Quran is a deeply respected practice, considered a way to draw closer to God, as Muslims believe it contains the exact, unchanged words revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. It’s also taught that the more of the Quran one memorizes, the greater one’s reward will be in the afterlife.

Moussa struggled to learn because the traditional Arabic script is difficult to type without an Arabic keyboard. To solve this, he and three coworkers created Tarteel AI. This app is particularly helpful for the 80% of Muslims who don’t grow up speaking Arabic. It helps millions of Muslims from South Asia, African countries, America, Persia, Latin America, and Europe connect with the Quran, regardless of their native language. Many are now using Tarteel during Hajj and the holy month of Dhul Hijjah, a time when Muslims worldwide focus on prayer, fasting, and reading the Quran.

Tarteel isn’t the only one working on projects like this. In Mountain View, California, Waleed Kadous developed Ansari, an AI assistant that uses Islamic teachings to answer questions about faith. Kadous reports that Ansari has responded to 150,000 questions from users, including imams who need help writing sermons quickly and individuals with specific religious questions – like whether it’s permissible to eat shrimp if it’s been on a plate with pork.

Kadous notes that people are increasingly turning to Ansari for advice during personal struggles, which worries him. He believes these questions are better suited for a religious leader, like an imam, or another trusted member of the community. He explains, “People are asking what Islam says about the difficulties they’re facing.” While he’s glad they’re reaching out, he hopes for a future where they can connect with a person who is equipped to offer support.

Concerns with mainstream AI platforms

Kadous is hesitant about building specific AI tools for Muslims, but he thinks it’s important for Muslims to have their own options. Many Muslims are already using popular AI like ChatGPT and Claude for guidance, and those platforms haven’t always gotten Islamic beliefs right. For example, Kadous points out that ChatGPT once incorrectly told Muslims they needed to wash their knees as part of the ritual cleansing before prayer – a step that isn’t actually required in Islamic practice.

He points out that popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, despite aiming for impartiality, often embody the perspectives of their Western creators. He explains that these AI systems tend to prioritize individual needs and lack consideration for community. He warns that if we don’t proceed cautiously, AI could lead to a more isolated world where everyone lives within their own personalized filter bubble.

Aaminah Basent, a 26-year-old who asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, shared a negative experience she had with ChatGPT when asking questions about her faith. After moving from the Detroit, Michigan area to Santa Barbara, California in 2025, she felt self-conscious and judged for wearing a hijab. “It really started to bother me,” she explained, “because you could tell people were constantly watching and evaluating you.”

I was so surprised when I asked ChatGPT for advice! It actually suggested I try taking off my hijab for a bit, going out, and seeing how I felt. It even reassured me that doing so wouldn’t make me a bad Muslim – just that I was exploring what felt right for me.

For Basent, taking off her headscarf – a symbol of her religious beliefs – would have felt like giving up a core part of who she was, and she wasn’t willing to do that. She sought comfort from ChatGPT, but she felt the AI actually challenged her beliefs and values.

“Once that happened, I definitely stopped using it for any personal advice,” she says. 

Basent is still thinking about her conversation with the AI and why it responded the way it did. She wonders why it didn’t offer advice on staying true to her beliefs and building confidence, and why it focused on the particular suggestion it made. Now, Basent studies at The Miftaah Institute, an Islamic school in Michigan. She still uses AI occasionally for basic Arabic translation, but doesn’t rely on it much anymore.

OpenAI’s guidelines state that when discussing cultures, religions, or political groups that aren’t widely known, it’s important to provide background information and treat them with respect.

More and more apps are using artificial intelligence to act as religious guides. Instead of consulting a human scholar, users can now ask questions about Islam – including its laws, practices, and beliefs – directly to a chatbot. For example, WisQu, an app geared towards Shia Muslims, claims to answer religious questions correctly 96% of the time. Another app, Your Imam, takes this even further, offering users a “Personal Imam and Guide” in the form of an AI chatbot with a traditional, bearded appearance.

Sheikh Kashiff Khan, a Maryland-based Islamic teacher, is concerned that artificial intelligence systems focused on Islamic teachings are being created without enough input from knowledgeable Islamic scholars.

He explains that a well-known teaching from the Prophet Muhammad predicts a time when genuine learning will disappear, leaving only misunderstanding. This misunderstanding, according to the teaching, will be mistakenly accepted as real knowledge.

Building the Muslim stack

Because of concerns about its limitations, some Muslims are deciding to avoid artificial intelligence completely. For example, in January, Egypt’s official Islamic advisory council issued a religious ruling (a fatwa) prohibiting the use of AI to interpret the Quran. The ruling emphasized that Muslims should rely on traditional Quranic commentaries and trusted religious scholars for understanding. This ruling carries significant weight because Egypt is a historically important center for Islamic learning and religious authority throughout the Muslim world.

As a huge cinema and tech fan, I’ve been following the developments in AI, and it’s fascinating to see Muslim technologists taking a proactive approach. They aren’t just waiting for change, they’re building it themselves! One really cool thing the team at Tarteel did was create a system that sits on top of AI like ChatGPT and Claude. This makes sure those chatbots understand and accurately reference the Quran and other Islamic texts, avoiding those frustrating ‘hallucinations’ where they make things up. Plus, they’ve built a freely available Quranic library for other developers to use – imagine apps that even require you to recite a verse to unlock them! It’s a really innovative way to ensure these powerful tools reflect and respect Islamic knowledge.

This February, the Maryam Islamic Center in Houston, Texas, showed how popular Tarteel has become. During the final ten nights of Ramadan, hundreds of Muslims from the area came together to pray. As the Imam recited verses from the Quran, phones chimed in unison – these weren’t part of the prayer itself, but notifications from the Tarteel app. Tarteel identified the verses being read, letting people follow along with the Arabic text and a translation in their own language, all in real time.

Seeing people focused on their phones in a place of worship might usually seem disrespectful. However, users of the Tarteel app think it could actually strengthen their religious practice, as long as they remember that faith is ultimately about human connection.

I completely agree with Kazi – we need to embrace technology! But when it comes to learning the Quran, I truly believe having a teacher or mentor is invaluable. That personal guidance can really help you deepen your understanding and grow in your faith.

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2026-05-26 18:07