Katara Tech Islamic Sharia and Artificial Intelligence: Islamic jurisprudence collided with modern algorithmic power during the 30th edition of the “Katara Tech” forum, hosted by the Cultural Village Foundation (Katara) in Doha. Organized in collaboration with Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs (Awqaf) and the “Islamonline.net” website, the forum took place on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, under the banner “Artificial Intelligence in Islamic Sharia Rulings.” The event sought to spark an in-depth dialogue on building robust frameworks to leverage the ongoing data revolution in serving digital Islamic content while fully safeguarding its scholarly authenticity.
Opening the forum, Thamer Al-Qadi, Director of the Information Technology Department at Katara, emphasized the foundation’s commitment to offering platforms that merge technical innovation with cultural identity. He highlighted that artificial intelligence has become an inevitable partner in advancing all sectors of knowledge.
Digital Fatwas: Semantic Precision in the Questioner’s Dialect
Addressing the dimension of Islamic legal rulings (fatwas) delivered via artificial intelligence, Jassim Al-Ali, Director of the Religious Call and Guidance Department at Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, presented the “Fatwa Chat” service integrated with the Islamweb platform. He described the initiative as a qualitative leap in facilitating access to verified religious information.
Al-Ali revealed the strategic partnership underpinning the service with the “Fanar AI” platform—a pioneering sovereign national generative AI initiative launched by the State of Qatar to serve as a secure digital repository. He explained that partnering with Fanar AI ensures that automated responses strictly align with approved Islamic sources. Because Fanar AI is state-owned and built in collaboration with prestigious academic and scientific institutions, it provides a crucial technical safeguard against hallucinated or misleading information.
He noted that the service employs semantic search techniques to connect users with a database of over 400,000 verified fatwas across WhatsApp and Telegram. A standout feature of the system is its ability to comprehend diverse local dialects and accurately analyze user intent, yielding a 99 percent user satisfaction rate. Furthermore, the system includes a reliable safety valve through a direct referral feature to human muftis for novel, complex issues that demand specialized independent reasoning (ijtihad).
Evaluating Friday Sermons Through Advanced Analytics
Expanding on practical applications, Sheikh Abdulrahman bin Abdulaziz Al Thani, Director of the Mosques Department at the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs in Qatar, unveiled a pioneering project—the first of its kind in the region—focused on analyzing and evaluating Friday sermons using artificial intelligence.
Sheikh Abdulrahman detailed how the system transcribes audio recordings of sermons into digital text before evaluating them against a matrix of nine precise scientific criteria. These parameters include thematic unity, strength of textual evidence, delivery quality, and content authenticity to verify proper citation. He stressed that this technology functions not as a traditional monitoring tool, but rather as a professional development mechanism designed to elevate the standards of preachers through objective automated reports that save hundreds of hours of manual labor.
Islamonline.net: Harmonizing Machine Capability and Human Expertise
The forum also highlighted the impact of AI technologies on digital Islamic content creation, where the islamonline.net website presented a balanced framework combining statistical metrics with scholarly rigor. On the technical front, Ashraf Sharif, Head of Information Technology at islamonline.net, shared impressive engagement figures, noting that total impressions across various digital platforms exceeded 465 million. He detailed the mechanisms of employing AI to produce video clips, convert written articles into audio content, and build intelligent search engines capable of contextual understanding.
From a theoretical and methodological perspective, Dr. Idriss Ahmad Tijani, a Sharia researcher specializing in Islamic jurisprudence and its foundational principles (Usul al-Fiqh), reviewed islamonline.net website’s experiencee with the technology. He argued that deploying AI within Islamic content organizations must currently remain confined to an auxiliary organizational tool that streamlines access to primary sources and supports scholarly research, rather than treating the machine as an independent jurisprudential entity.
Dr. Tijani addressed the challenge of AI hallucinations and the machine’s inherent lack of emotional and spiritual perception, underlining the necessity of human oversight to guarantee content integrity. He commended the partnership with the Fanar AI platform from a perspective of scholarly reliability, noting that it successfully establishes a secure AI ecosystem drawing data from reputable academic institutions, while sharing practical models for utilizing technology in Islamic studies.
Following the keynote presentations, Moath Yousuf Al-Qasemi, Head of the Religious Guidance Section at the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs in Qatar, moderated an interactive panel discussion covering the ideas, insights, and digital applications presented by the speakers.
To conclude the forum, Thamer Al-Qadi honored the participating experts and speakers in recognition of their contributions to the success of the 30th edition of Katara Tech. The event closed with a core takeaway: artificial intelligence represents a historic opportunity for Islamic religious sciences, provided it remains guided by rigorous scholarly oversight
By Musa A. Mosiudi
