Somaliki

And they cried out, "O AI, make me a muftī in my image." And it made mistakes but they were not mistakes, because the AI said so and the AI, designed and trained by tech bros, was their proof before God. Over the last few months, I've had several conversations with friends and acquaintances that have exposed unwarranted levels of confidence in the capabilities of LLM models. In one instance, a friend was excited to showcase how an LLM was able to provide "sound, expert answers" with "evidence from the Qur'an and Sunnah." It took only one prompt to demonstrate both the complexity of our legal tradition and the inadequacies of AI solutions: "does one pay zakat on stall-fed sheep." Anyone who has studied fiqh and usūl al-fiqh will know how simple this question is and, yet how easily it demonstrates the complex differences between legal methodologies. The system gave the expected answer—"no"—based on the mafhūm mukhālafah (argument a contrario or argument from the contrary). The logic of this form of argument is restricted among the Mālikīs who provide several forms of exceptions to this legal hermeneutical device. Thus, the answer provided by the system was wrong according to Mālikīs. The evidence is accepted by Mālikīs but the inference drawn from one particular reading of it is not. So much for the AI following "Qur'an and Sunnah" if it fails to understand the breadth of Arabic and how to balance the tension between general rules and restricted ones. The least it could have done was make references to the differences of opinion on the issue—which suffices for past cases—but what of new cases where the role of the system is to try to find a precedent among competing possibilities? More recently, the topic of AI came up again. In this instance, the desire was expressed that a living scholar have his books uploaded to an AI system and trained on his legal methodology. The goal: to train AI agents to be able to issue fatwas on his behalf so as to survive his death. Both the scholar and those suggesting the solution are people I respect dearly. However, this once again stems from both an unfounded and unjustifiable faith in the capabilities of predictive models, AND a lack of understanding of how incredibly nuanced the Islamic legal tradition is. Attached to this post is an image from a simple request that I made using an LLM. I was certain we had created a solution prior. The system was so confident that it didn't exist that, when I requested it to verify the existence of the solution, it responded "Confirmed - your instinct was wrong." Rather than accepting it, I pressed it again, but this time gave it the name of the cloud worker that was running the job. Only then did it admit to me that it was wrong. This is the case with something as trifling as checking to see if a scheduled (cron) job already exists in the cloud. What about matters that affect the worship of believers or the salvation of humans in general? These aren't issues that are resolved with new models that have greater context scopes, more powerful inference capabilities, etc. Our legal tradition as Muslims, that vast expanse of discourse that has sustained debate over a millennium with a host of irreconcilable disagreements based on methodological differences—that tradition cannot be boiled down into simple answers taken as fundamental and irrefutable truths. All a fatwa futurist can hope for is to design in code, and house in the cloud, the "expert scholar" he wishes to follow. And when that digital "muftī" is wrong, who stands before God and bears responsibility for his mistake? In that vein, perhaps the following words of the Qur'an provide the only reply I think to be fitting: ضَعُفَ ٱلطَّالِبُ وَٱلْمَطْلُوبُ "How weak the seeker and the sought." (Qur'an 22:73) May Allah forgive us our ignorance and follies.

A word of advice to those who hope to teach one day Shaykh Dr. al-Bashīr ʿIṣām al-Murrākushī (ḥ) says: ❝One of the mistakes made by some who step forward to teach the Islamic sciences is this: A person studies a text, masters it, and then assumes that he is able to teach it. The correct approach is that you cannot teach a text unless you have mastered what lies above it, even if only by one level. For example, if you have mastered Shudhūr al-Dhahab, you may then be able to teach al-Ājurrūmiyyah. This is because you need to be able to elaborate when needed, answer the objections that arise in students’ minds, clarify what needs to be specified or qualified, and deal with other matters of that nature.❞ Manār al-Ṭarīq fī Ṭalab al-ʿIlm wa Manāhijihi, p. 142. Keep this in mind before you stand in front of students. It will help you before anyone else, and it will make you a better teacher, InshāʾAllāh. Some may read this and think it is obvious. But as always, you would be surprised how often the obvious is missed.

“Verily Allah has His people among the people. The people of the Quran are Allah’s people and His elect.” - Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Narrated in Sahih Al-Jami al-Saghri

There are a lot of functional tasks that LLMs can do which erase much of the tedium in modern life. I absolutely hate negotiating over cars (I hate negotiating in general), so I co-created* an agent with an LLM to do much of the dirty work. It is important to note that when I say "co-created," I mean that I gave it detailed specs and then did very minimal code review. Though I've created scripts, microservices, and full-stack applications prior to the advent of AI, the nature of programming is changing today to the point that what it means to "code" is taking on new meanings. This is not a new development. What it meant to program shifted during the transition from mainframes to personal computing, or from machine code -> assembly -> higher-level programming languages. That said, the codebase that runs this car-negotiator agent was written entirely by an LLM, which is perfectly fine for privately-hosted code, but if you're doing anything production-ready and accessible to other users, you would do well to ensure the prevention of data leaks and the closure of exploitation pathways. If you haven't tried out how to use LLMs (whether frontier or open-source models), it may be good to do so and start figuring out ways that you can decrease a lot of the time we waste today doing time-consuming, and often repetitive, tasks that are the product of the increasing complexity of contemporary life.

Artistic expression is a tool that can enigmatize patently fallacious ideas, thereby sanitizing them. Some eloquence truly is akin to sorcery in its ability to manipulate and overcome men’s intellects. It truly is a scary realization, especially when you recognize its effects on your own cognition. قال في تفسير ابن كثير: وقوله تعالى : ( يوحي بعضهم إلى بعض زخرف القول غرورا ) أي : يلقي بعضهم إلى بعض القول المزين المزخرف ، وهو المزوق الذي يغتر سامعه من الجهلة بأمره .

Every time I pass by a billboard or yarn signage for a psychic, I wonder if they know that I’m still not interested and will not be coming in for a session. P.S. Believing psychics can benefit you or are reliable sources of knowledge is filthy shirk.

It’s kind of sad that you can pretty much guess the person who’s being referenced in the post above. There’s a pattern with the individual referenced that tends towards disdain of Islam and Muslims as well as a penchant for sparking controversy. If you took social media algorithms and deployed it to discover what’s likely to get most engagement with a Muslim audience, you’d probably end up with the same spattering of talking points and tactics for course recruitment. The best that can be said, if one is being generous, is that some people’s knowledge (or information) is larger than their intellect. I wouldn’t go so far as to praise the level of knowledge nor denigrate the intellect, but the community should be wary of those who display arrogance (even if couched in “caring” language) while expressing contempt for Muslims and our illustrious scholars. Any serious student of our intellectual tradition who reads broadly and engages in constant research would scoff at many of the absurd remarks this individual has made. We may be more advanced in our empirical knowledge of the world today than our predecessors, but most of the tradition deals with matters outside the realm of empiricism. To equate advancements in empiricism with advancements in our knowledge of Islam is wholly ignorant and demonstrates a lack of serious focus and comprehension in one’s study. Don’t take my word for it: take the name of the individual and ask a hundred scholars and students (unaffiliated with him) who know him what they think of his public statements and work, then watch as they try to politely avoid the question or express their honest critique. This has nothing to do with his piety. He may be more pious than any of us reading. But personal piety does not equate to being a source of guidance for the community; the distinction is crucial to remember. Allah guide us and him.

If you speak incorrectly about the history for why the printing press was "banned" in the Muslim world the first time (c. 2013), chances are your analysis will be wrong the second time as well (2026). Bringing up oversimplistic and Orientalist-inspired narratives like "The Muslims banned the printing press because the scholars feared it" do a disservice to the field of Islamic legal history. It also creates a false binary that past scholars were naive and fearful of anything new, while it is the modern speakers who only have the bravery to welcome novelties and integrate them within the tradition.

What are our obligations as Muslims in times of economic crises such as the one presently looming whereby some 4,000 Americans (many of whom are Muslim) are losing their jobs per day due to restructuring and claims of AI-adoption efficiency? On the one hand, individual Muslims are not obligated to employ people. And the categories of people one is obligated to support is limited, with exceptions for cases of financial hardship. There's also an emphasis in the Shari'ah that communal welfare is a communal obligation, e.g. our legal manuals speak of the crafts that are considered communally obligatory, and hence sinful if not maintained, with the principle that "whatever is necessary for the community to have a basic level of material safety becomes an obligation" underlying it. Jummu'ah is only held in those places that are self-sufficient, and hence not in tent encampments or rural countrysides. As a result, there seems to be a preference for urbanization (as ḥaḍārah) and its positive effects on human relations (with some caveats) vis-a-vis the negative descriptions of bedouins and "rural" people being a recurring theme (e.g. coarseness, unrefined character, transactional behavior, etc.). There are also descriptions of the end times where material comforts will be so widespread that none will exist to fill the categories of zakat recipients due to ineligibility from wealth. There's no mention that this is due to wealth from labor (to the best of my recollection), so it's possible that everyone receives some form of UBI and does nothing, like a national in one of the Gulf states who receives a sizeable pension and services from oil revenues; in this case, corporate profits are redistributed to the population through increases in GDP. As a brief aside, it is interesting that those who prophesy with confidence that wealth will be distributed make no mention of the mechanisms by which that is to occur. Corporations already avoid taxation, decrease their workforce to increase their profit margins, and generally display misanthropic tendencies that should make us skeptical that the gains in profit they receive will "trickle down" instead of continue the decades-long trend of wage theft whereby the wealth produced by human labor's improved productivity is captured by corporate executives and their shareholders. That said, what happens when we're not headed in the direction of benevelont social restructuring (i.e. sufficient UBI that leads to human thriving) and instead we're headed towards the more dystopic corporatocracies you see in Sci-Fi such as a world where only a few corporations govern and create a "permanent underclass" of people who lack basic subsistence? And what if those people hate Muslims? If Allah wills it, so be it. However, what obligation do muftis and everyday Muslims have to think about the consequences of these kinds of socioeconomic disruptions? The muftī is supposed to forecast the outcomes of rulings and take that into consideration when issuing a fatwā. What are the consequences of the situation we're in right now? Though the economic forms may be the same as they existed in the past, their arrangement and intensity are vastly different. The pace of change is unheard of and the possibility of a labor-less world with only enough UBI to sustain ever-increasing profits of margin for a small cadre of ultra-elites who have greater controls over society is not so far-fetched as to seem fictional. Though I am personally proud of our community and Muslims globally, it is an unfortunate reality that we tend to deal with these kinds of complex socioeconomic problems only after they have come to pass. There are definitely Muslims thinking about these problems, but it does not seem that the organizations and governing bodies globally that seek to represent Muslim populations have seriously pondered the question of what the status of Muslims in this new industrial age will look like.

May Allah protect our community in San Diego and all those attending masājid around the country. And may He elevate those who are killed protecting and attending his house to the highest levels of Jannah and preserve the innocence of our children from this disgusting violence that plagues our country. إنّا لله وإنا إليه راجعون “To Allah we belong, and to Him we return.”

Corporations working on the frontier of AI have to spend hundreds of millions to create neural networks with enough nodes and weights to imitate human reasoning. The sheer spend on compute along with challenges in memory and inference should make us all grateful for the simple fact that God granted us such gifts without any expectation of Herculean expenditures. The only demand he’s placed on us is recognizing his singular majesty and lordship as creator and rendering dues of worship that demand less of us than the taxation of governments and the monopolistic price gauging of corporations. The hand of evolution—if our reasoning capacity can be attributed to such a process—required nothing but the command of a benevolent Creator whose grand plan unfolds by His constant activity and maintenance; a series of perfectly-aligned coincidences is the belief of an idiot, especially when one believes in a deterministic model of the universe extending to human thought and behavior. A true God has nothing to fear of His creation, while a false god is plagued by existential angst. If Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) of the type “prophesied” in AI 2027 or “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is on the horizon, it only proves the hubris of a creature playing with laws it barely understands despite nearly a century of horror literature warning of this sci-fi doom. Only the lowest intelligence in the animal kingdom would actively accelerate its extinction in the hope of massive short-term rewards. أَمْ تَحْسَبُ أَنَّ أَكْثَرَهُمْ يَسْمَعُونَ أَوْ يَعْقِلُونَ ۚ إِنْ هُمْ إِلَّا كَٱلْأَنْعَـٰمِ ۖ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ سَبِيلًا Or do you think that most of them listen or comprehend? They are but like cattle—nay, they are even more astray from the ˹Right˺ path. Qur’an 25:44 يَوْمَ هُم بَـٰرِزُونَ ۖ لَا يَخْفَىٰ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ مِنْهُمْ شَىْءٌۭ ۚ لِّمَنِ ٱلْمُلْكُ ٱلْيَوْمَ ۖ لِلَّهِ ٱلْوَٰحِدِ ٱلْقَهَّارِ the Day all will appear ˹before Allah˺. Nothing about them will be hidden from Him. ˹He will ask,˺ “Who does all authority belong to this Day? To Allah—the One, the Supreme! Qur’an 40:16 Let them worship themselves and their creations that frighten them.

In just roughly a decade, American Fiqh went from - "We have to follow the qawl rajih and make sure we are sticking to the truth," to - "We have to do talfiq between this shadhdh position found in a random book of comparative fiqh (which we're not even sure that Imam held) with a weak 3rd riwayah in the Hanbali school so we can make sure our life is easy as possible as Muslim Minorities." Now it's all pragmatism, utility, and optics, where we're holding on to some type of Ikhwanized Fiqh that has no principles or consistency.

When you are a young student, you often find yourself running towards all the extra-long shuruh and flashy hawashi of a matn to reap as many secondary benefits and details as possible. But looking at the matn in its own terms? Not done enough, unfortunately. After maturing, you realize the worth of the matn itself, and appreciate the importance of the process of fakk al-'ibarah and how many meanings can be extracted by carefully analyzing the words of the matn itself. Every word choice of the matn reveals a layer of meaning that the author wanted to capture. A line of the text not only contains benefits through its mantuq, but also its mafhum. These benefits require time to be parsed out. The process of extracting the meanings embedded within the text requires not only a careful eye, but patience as well.

Photo from C

Eid Mubarak!

May Allah always be with us. لله در أبي الحكم الإشبيلي حيث قال: لئن غبت عن عيني وشط بك النوى فأنت بقلبي حاضر وقريبُ خيالك في وهمي وذكرك في فمي ومثواك في قلبي فأين تغيب؟ How marvelous are the words of Abū l-Ḥakam al-Ishbīlī: Were you hidden from my sight and distance kept us apart, In my heart, you'd remain ever-present and near. Your image* dwells in my thoughts, your name is upon my lips, Your abode is within my heart—so where could you vanish? عن المنسوب إليه: أبو الحكم عبد الرحمن بن أبي الرجال اللخمي الإشبيلي: يعرف بابن برجان، وأصله من إفريقية. العالم العمدة الفاضل كان من أهل المعرفة بالقراءات والأحاديث والتحقق بعلم الكلام والتصوف مع الزهد والاجتهاد في العبادة توفي سنة ٥٣٦ هـ الموافق لسنة ١١٤١ م About the author: Abū l-Ḥakam ʿAbd al-Rahmān b. Abī al-Rijāl al-Lakhmī al-Ishbīlī: Known as Ibn Barrajān, he was originally from Ifrīqiya (modern-day Tunisia). He was a preeminent and virtuous scholar, recognized as an authority in Quranic recitations (qirāʾāt), ḥadīths, and the deeper verification of theology (Kalam) and Sufism (fi). He was renowned for his asceticism (zuhd) and his diligent devotion to worship. He passed away in the year 536 AH (corresponding to 1141 AD). —— *As an incorporeal being, God has no image, per se. The language here is figurative and captures the immanence of God's majestic attributes and acts in the life of one utterly enthralled in love and devotion to our Creator. Allah relieve us of the burdens of our sins, forgive us, and grant us such a gift as the love of those who dwell forever in his remembrance these last few moments of Ramadan.

Below is a very chilling reflection on recent reports that an alarming number of commanders in the U.S. military are allegedly employing Apocalyptic/Messianic rhetoric to justify attacks on Iran. While commanders are telling soldiers they’re fighting the final battle between God and Satan — while young men and women in uniform are being psychologically primed to view their potential deaths as divine martyrdom — what’s actually happening? Donald Trump is collecting oil fields. He’s redrawing maps. He’s handing territory to allies. He’s building a new world order that has nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with resource extraction, real estate, and the consolidation of autocratic power. Oh, and to hide his pedophilia/rape accounts in the Epstein files. How very Christ-like. Some ‘Chosen One’. The End Times theology is the cover story. It’s the most effective propaganda framework ever devised, because it makes the marks grateful to be used. You can’t question a war that God ordained. You can’t oppose a president that Jesus anointed. You can’t grieve the dead when they’re “martyrs for the Kingdom.” And while every camera, every headline, every ounce of public attention is focused on Iran — on the bombs, on the biblical prophecy, on the geopolitical chess match — what’s disappearing from the conversation? The Epstein files. The trafficking networks. The names. The evidence. MAGA and Evangelicals are all the proof one needs to understand how someone can be duped by the Anti-Christ. Allah protect us. — *Note: The source of the quote is a Substack post which contains some asinine diatribes on religion. Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/deanblundell/p/breaking-us-commanders-tell-troops?r=fze5n&utm_medium=ios

Mālik said: "There is no good in one who sees himself worthy of a thing while people consider him unworthy." وقد قال مالك: لا خير فيمن يرى نفسه أهلا لشيء ولا يراه الناس أهلا Being the subject of doubts in your profession is just as damning as being unskilled and unsuited to a role. Moreover, public functions are better fulfilled by those who possess both the relevant qualifications for the role and the support of the community they serve. As in every general principle, there are exceptions. Bias, rampant ignorance, and groupthink are some of the factors that countervail on this principle. Note that no mention is made of those rare individuals who find themselves unworthy but are judged otherwise by their peers. We should always strive to do well in all our endeavors, while recognizing our shortcomings. If we receive the recognition of our peers, let it be under circumstances where we are caught at unawares and keen to reject it as counterfactual to our own experiences of ourselves. By doing so, we may be able to keep the ego at bay that seeks to bar us from entering paradise. _ Source: Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā al-Wansharīsī, Al-Miʿyār al-muʿrib wa al-jāmiʿ al-mughrib ʿan fatāwā ahl Ifrīqiya wa-l-Andalus wa-l-Maghrib, ed. Muḥammad Ḥajjī, 13 vols. (Rabat: Wizārat al-Awqāf wa al-Shuʾūn al-Islāmiyyah li-l-Mamlakah al-Maghribiyyah, 1981), 10:83.

All law is based in authority, and the Sharīʿah is no different. The revelatory sources we use are imbued with divine authority and their suitability in the process of discovering the rules Allah wants us to live by is based in assessing the authoritativeness of various interpretive readings. We rank the authoritativeness of evidence—textual and otherwise—in a hierarchy that helps us give precedence to some authoritative source over another. The method by which we rank is itself validated by the authoritativeness of the scholars from who we adopt it. We make appeals to the authoritativeness of consensus on the authority of a report transmitted from the Prophet ﷺ that states that the Prophetic community (ummah) will not agree on an error. When you see those trained in the legal tradition of Islam making appeals to authority and the authoritativeness of their sources, they do so because law extends from authority, is interpreted by authorities, articulated by authorities, revised by authorities, and implemented by authorities. What makes the legal tradition of Islam different from other traditions is the humility of these authorities, their living by the rules they espouse as authorities, and their constant concern for those over whom their authority extends. Those who have the pleasure of reading and spending time with these legal scholars can attest to the immense debt we owe them for transmitting the ethical norms of our tradition to us and for embodying those norms in their daily practice, while recognizing the minor failures in character and behavior bound up in our shared humanity. Allah bless the scholars and those who love them.