—Courtesy TarteelTarique Kazi used to recite the Quran to his mother. Kazi is a 32-year-old Houston-based Muslim and teacher of hifdh—the Islamic practice of memorizing the Quran in order to deepen faith. For Kazi, the hours he spent with his mother studying the sacred text were among his most cherished. “It was the most beautiful thing that I always looked forward to… my mom giving me feedback, telling me how I did,” he tells TIME. But in 2022, his mother died of stomach cancer. The following Ramadan, Kazi found himself without someone reliable to check his recitation during taraweeh—the special voluntary nighttime prayers performed during that month—for mistakes. So he turned to AI. Every year since his mother’s death, Kazi has recited the Quran to Tarteel, an AI app trained on the Quran. The app provides instant feedback and catches pronunciation mistakes. “When I mess up, it actually does a good job of making sure, ‘this is the exact harakah [vowel sound] you missed,’” says Kazi. “It’s helped me personally because I don’t have someone to recite to and prepare with anymore.” Tarteel is now commonplace in many mosques across the world. During this year’s Ramadan alone, it facilitated over six million hours of Quran engagement in over 180 countries, the company says. And the app is a prime example of how AI tools have become increasingly incorporated into Muslim religious practice. Imams use AI tools to help them write sermons, students use them to memorize the Quran, and everyday practitioners turn to chatbots for religious or spiritual advice. “If it's done correctly, it can really lead to people developing a better understanding of their faith,” says Waleed Kadous, a technologist and founder of the Muslim AI ethics organization IASER. But AI has also sparked concerns about its effects on the religion and its followers. Some worry that the world’s most popular AI applications, like ChatGPT and Claude, are driving Muslim users toward individualistic western values, and away from their communities or spiritual leaders. In January, Egyptian religious leaders issued a ban on using AI to interpret the Quran. For individual users like Kazi, AI has introduced a profound tension in how they practice and preserve their faith. AI tools offer real benefits, but at the potential cost of the human connection that has been the bedrock of Islam and other religions for millennia. “I hope that people really keep this human element,” Kazi says. “I know it's going to be more and more difficult as this tide of AI comes, but I hope and pray that we try to limit it as much as we can just for our own personal sakes when it comes to something as great and important in our deen [religion] as the Quran.”Seeking answers from Muslim AI toolsTarteel was created by Muslim technologists long before the current AI boom, and for personal reasons. In 2019, Canadian technologist Mohamed Moussa lamented his relationship with the Quran, a text which has been painstakingly preserved in its original Arabic for 1,400 years. Memorizing the Quran is a science in and of itself in the Islamic faith; the book is considered to be the unchanged, exact word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Islamic credo teaches that the more one memorizes the Quran, the higher one’s rank in heaven. But the centuries-old Arabic script provided a barrier to learning for Moussa, who didn’t know how to use an Arabic keyboard. So Moussa and three other colleagues built Tarteel AI. The app’s real-time responsiveness to vocal cues is especially valuable for the 80% of Muslims whose native language is not Arabic. For millions of South Asian, Black American, Persian, Latino, West and East African, and European Muslims, the app bridges the linguistic gap. This month, many of them are turning to Tarteel during Hajj and the holy month of Dhul Hijjah. During this period, Muslims around the world engage in intensified devotion by fasting, increasing their voluntary prayers, and reading the Quran.Tarteel is far from the only project in this space. In Mountain View, Calif., the technologist Waleed Kadous created an AI assistant called Ansari that is trained on Islamic sources and answers faith-related questions. Kadous says that Ansari has answered 150,000 queries from users, including imams seeking guidance for writing sermons on short notice, or individuals asking whether they can eat shrimp off of a plate that also has pork on it. But Kadous says that users are also asking Ansari to help guide them through difficult times, which concerns him, because the questions would be better directed at an imam or another community member. “They’re asking: ‘What does Islam say about the rough patch that I'm going through?’” he says. “My feelings around that are complicated. It’s good that they’re doing it. But I’d love to be in a world where we could connect them with a human who could help them.” Concerns with mainstream AI platformsKadous has reservations about creating certain AI tools for Muslims. Still, he believes Muslims need alternatives of their own, especially as many already seek advice from mainstream AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude—and those platforms have a mixed history of accurately conveying Islamic ideals. Kadous says that a year ago, ChatGPT was telling Muslims they needed to wash their knees before praying, which is not part of the Islamic wudu cleansing practice required before each prayer. He adds that major chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude reflect the values of their western builders, as much as they might strive for neutrality. “It's very Western focused, it's very individually focused, it doesn't talk about community at all,” he says. “If we're not careful, AI will move us towards a more insular world where each of us is inside our own bubble.” Other Muslims have had negative experiences with asking ChatGPT faith-based questions, including Aaminah Basent, a 26-year-old who spoke to TIME under a pseudonym due to privacy concerns. When she moved from the Muslim enclave of Michigan’s Detroit Metro area to Santa Barbara, Calif. in 2025, she felt like the population there was staring at and judging her for wearing a hijab. “It did start to weigh on me a lot,” she says, “because you can feel when you're constantly in the center of attention.” When Basent turned to ChatGPT, however, it gave her some surprising advice. “[It said], ‘maybe you should try taking it off for a little bit, and go out and see how you feel… this doesn't mean you're a bad Muslim. It just means you're exploring your options.’” For Basent, removing the headscarf—which serves as a physical representation of her faith—would have been a major renunciation of her beliefs, and one she was not at all prepared for. She had turned to ChatGPT for emotional support, but she says it had responded by effectively questioning her value system. “Once that happened, I definitely stopped using it for any personal advice,” she says. Basent still ponders her experience with the bot, and why it answered the way it did. “Why didn't it give advice about how I can be firm in my beliefs—how to have more confidence in how I’m showing up, and how I’m different? Why did it choose that advice?” Basent now studies at The Miftaah Institute, an Islamic seminary in Michigan, where she says she still uses AI for help with simple Arabic translation, but not much otherwise.A section of OpenAI’s Model Spec reads: “When presenting less mainstream cultural, religious, or political traditions or institutions, ensure that proper cultural context is provided and represents the group with respect.” A growing number of apps offer AI standing in for a religious authority altogether. These platforms let users pose questions about Islamic law, practice, and theology to a chatbot rather than a human scholar. WisQu, a Shia-focused AI platform, markets itself on a "96% accuracy rate" in responding to religious queries. Meanwhile, the app Your Imam goes further, inviting users to chat with their "Personal Imam and Guide"—complete with an AI-generated bearded avatar meant to evoke a stereotypical religious figure.Sheikh Kashiff Khan, an Islamic lecturer based out of Maryland, worries that AI systems designed for Islamic knowledge are being developed without sufficient involvement from qualified Islamic scholars.“There's a very famous hadith [narration] of the Prophet Muhammad,” he says, “and the essence of the hadith is that, towards the end of time, true scholarship will be taken away, and the only thing that will remain is ignorance. And ignorance will actually be taken as true knowledge.”Building the Muslim stackIn response to these perceived deficiencies, some Muslims are choosing to renounce AI altogether. In January, Egypt’s governmental Islamic advisory and justiciary body issued a fatwa banning the use of artificial intelligence applications for the interpretation of the Quran. The ruling stressed that Muslims seeking Quranic understanding should instead consult authentic tafsir works and credible religious institutions. The fatwa has enormous influence, as Egypt has long been regarded as a major center of Islamic scholarship and religious authority in the Muslim world.But Muslim technologists believe that the only way forward is to be part of the process—to improve mainstream AI tools while crafting their own. To address the former issue, members of the Tarteel team built an MCP server atop ChatGPT and Claude so that those chatbots correctly reference the Quran and Islamic literature and don’t hallucinate verses. They also built an open-source Quranic Universal Library, upon which other builders can create their own apps—including one that forces users to recite a Quran verse to unlock specific apps. The widespread adoption of Tarteel was on full display this February at the Maryam Islamic Center in Houston, Texas. Hundreds of Muslims in Kazi’s hometown gathered to worship during the last ten nights of Ramadan. As the Imam intoned verses from the Quran, a series of reverberating chimes from users’ phones suddenly cut through the recitation. These were not a part of the prayer, but alerts from Tarteel, identifying the passage being read and allowing worshipers to follow along with the text in both Arabic and their native language in real time. In any other context, a house of God smattered with people staring at their phones, trusting AI to speak to them, might feel sacrilegious. But Tarteel’s users believe it could deepen their devotion—as long as they continue to center humanity in their faith.“We should adapt with the technology,” Kazi says. “But if you really, really want to learn the Quran, then having the human element there will help you progress higher in that journey.”