Can AI issue a fatwa? What Dar al-Ifta, the Ja'fari school and the researchers say

What a fatwa is

A fatwa is a considered answer to a question of Islamic law given by someone qualified to give it. The qualification is the point. Across traditions the mufti must have the training to derive rulings from the sources, must be trustworthy and accountable, and must engage with the questioner's actual circumstances. A fatwa is not binding like a court judgement, but it carries the weight of the person who issued it, and the questioner relies on that person.

Everything that follows is a consequence of that definition.

Dar al-Ifta's ruling, in its own terms

Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah is Egypt's official fatwa body and one of the most-cited Sunni institutions in the world. Its fatwa 22255 addresses the question directly. Three findings:

• AI as such is permissible. "The use of AI technology is, in principle, permissible," and its ruling "is contingent on the purpose for which it is used": lawful, recommended, obligatory, disliked or prohibited according to that purpose.
• AI as a source of fatwas is not. "It is impermissible in Islamic law to rely on AI applications to obtain a fatwa."
• Why. A fatwa must come from a qualified scholar who is legally accountable, honest, trustworthy and knowledgeable; a mufti lacking those requirements "cannot be relied upon in their pronouncements." Current AI tools produce answers that may be correct, incorrect or contradictory to established rulings; they lack sound methodology, knowledge of authoritative sources and the ability to assess their own inputs and conclusions; and rulings that depend on custom change with time, place and circumstance in ways that require human judgement. In the ruling's words, such tools "remain outside the scope of fatwa."

In January 2026 the same institution answered a formal query about using tools such as ChatGPT to explain Quranic verses: relying independently or entirely on AI-generated interpretation is forbidden, because such tools operate through statistical processing without genuine comprehension and expose the text to conjecture and misrepresentation. Coverage noted that the ruling was not a rejection of digital technology, and Egypt has separately explored AI systems to assist human muftis with retrieval and drafting. The line is drawn at authority.

The Ja'fari position

The two traditions reason differently, from institutional qualification on one side and personal taqlid on the other, and arrive at the same operational rule: a human rules; software may only report.

What the research found

Academic work in 2025 and 2026 tested the tools rather than theorising about them.

• A comparative study of AI-generated and human-issued fatawa published by the University of Malaya tested a leading general-purpose model and found a systematic bias toward permissiveness, with the model relying on secondary sources rather than authoritative fatwa collections. Its authors concluded that such programs cannot achieve the status of an Islamic judge.
• A 2025 paper in a Turkish communication journal on the limits of AI in Islamic religious communication argued that human oversight is necessary to maintain the authenticity of religious verdicts and proposed a framework for integrating AI responsibly.
• A survey of Islamic chatbots presented at the Muslims in ML workshop at NeurIPS in December 2025 catalogued both the benefit of wider access to religious knowledge and the risk of eroding authority, and set out recommendations for responsible design.

None of this is a surprise given the Dar al-Ifta reasoning: the tools' failure modes are exactly the ones the fatwa anticipated.

What AI may still do, and do well

The rulings fence off issuing fatwas. They leave a wide field open:

• Retrieval. Find the fatwa, the standard, the ruling, and quote it with its source. This is a reference service, and the better it is grounded, the more useful.
• Explanation. Put a ruling in plain language, with the original alongside so the reader can check the paraphrase.
• Rule application. Where scholars have published a rule in checkable form, such as a financial screening threshold, software may apply it at scale. HalalScreener does this for stocks, ETFs and crypto; it applies rules, it does not write them, and it does not certify.
• Preparation. Help a person assemble the facts and the relevant positions before asking a scholar.
• Triage inside institutions. Route routine questions to existing answers and send novel ones to a mufti, as Egyptian and Emirati bodies have been studied doing.

The difference between these and a fatwa is who holds the authority at the end. For how to tell whether a tool respects that line, see how to check an AI Islamic answer. For how a tool can be built to stay inside it, see grounded AI for Islamic questions.

What would change our answer

A formal statement from a major institution in either tradition recognising an automated system as competent to issue rulings. We know of none, we do not expect one, and we will record it here with its source if it appears.