The Sophistication of AI: Between Hope and Concern
Artificial Intelligence researchers, including the world’s ‘fathers of AI’, have published research once again warning governments to prepare for an AI ‘intelligence explosion’.
While it can bring positive impacts, such as in the medical field and other technologies, this intelligence explosion carries three major risks: biological and cyber threats, the loss of human control and involvement, and the threat of interstate warfare.
Beyond providing convenience, AI presents new challenges. On one hand, it can assist individuals in the learning process. On the other, it can foster intellectual laziness because it is prone to being used as a primary or final reference. When AI easily provides answers, human thinking capacity may become underutilised. Ideally, AI should serve as a tool to enrich ideas and act as an ‘idea booster’ rather than the primary source. The problem arises when individuals use AI as a shortcut to answers without undergoing the process of understanding, analysing, and constructing their own framework of comprehension. The answers provided by AI appear so perfect that the thinking process is deemed unnecessary. If this continues, individuals may possess many answers but remain unable to explain the reasoning behind them.
This crisis of thought must be addressed seriously. In the field of education, the goal should be to shape individuals capable of analysing problems, extracting information, testing truth, constructing arguments, and drawing conclusions based on understanding.
Dependence on AI may shift these objectives when the measure of learning success is reduced merely to completed tasks. Technological sophistication becomes an irony when the humans utilising it lose their critical thinking power.
Therefore, educating the public about AI should focus on building critical thinking skills, rather than merely teaching how to use it. People must be equipped with the ability to filter information, verify answers, criticise AI outputs, and continue developing ideas through their own cognitive processes.
AI should be positioned as a human aid for thinking, not as a machine that replaces the thinking process. The future of generations is determined not only by the mastery of advanced technology but also by the sharpness of the intellect they use to think.
This literacy chaos proves the failure of the secular education system, which deliberately separates religious knowledge from general science. The current system succeeds in producing surgeons skilled in surgery but blind to Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh muamalah), or engineers capable of building magnificent buildings but ignorant of the principles of Islamic legal theory (usul fiqh). When they face religious dilemmas, they ultimately turn to ‘AI Ustaz’. The Muslim community cannot rise from this intellectual defeat if the standards of right and wrong still rely on non-Islamic frameworks.
Tracing back, these issues stem from the inability of the Muslim community to control the technology they consume. Biased algorithms from Silicon Valley cannot be countered by mere individual moral appeals for wise internet usage or fatwas from those who consult AI for religious guidance. The problem is no longer merely personal, but structural. The Big Tech corporations driving societal thought through AI today are fully supported by the political and economic policies of Western superpowers.
To face the hegemony of this system, the Muslim community requires an equal counterweight—a global institution that possesses not only religious authority but also political sovereignty and the financial strength to build an independent technological ecosystem. Such a protective vessel would manifest in a global political institution.
As an ideological institution, Islam will not face technology with fear or antipathy. Instead, Islam will construct three main pillars in responding to science and technology to safeguard the faith and thought of the community.
First, legitimate scholarly authority. Islam will return the authority of fatwa and ijtihad absolutely to qualified mujtahid scholars who possess verified piety and knowledge. The state will strictly prohibit assigning ‘legal reference’ status to inanimate entities like AI to maintain the purity of Sharia law.
Second, a revolution in the education system. The state will abolish the dichotomy of secular education. An Islamic curriculum will integrate modern science with a strong understanding of Islamic culture (tsaqafah). The goal is to produce general scientists (doctors, engineers, IT experts, etc.) who also master the foundations of religious sciences, ensuring they possess mature thinking capacities and are not easily deceived by instant answers from foreign technologies.
Third, independence in technological policy. The state will not allow the Muslim community to remain passive consumers dependent on foreign Big Tech. Sheikh An-Nabhani, in ‘How the Khilafah was Destroyed’, warned that technological dependence is a gateway for Western cultural invasion.
Islamic technological policy will strictly base AI usage on the principles of usul fiqh. Islam clearly distinguishes between ‘hadharah’ (the intellectual bond that influences a worldview) and ‘madaniyah’ (the physical form of scientific progress/tools). AI technology is essentially ‘madaniyah umum’ (general tools) which is ‘mubah’ (permissible) to utilise.
Therefore, Islam will take a leading role in the development of AI research, but from a valid position. First, AI as a service (khidmat). AI will be massively optimised as a tool for state administration, scientific research, the rapid translation of texts, and the digitalisation of…