Is AI the Dajjal? The Untold Truth About Islam & Artificial Intelligence ft. Shahbaaz Khan | TBT

Want to be a guest on Thought Behind Things? Apply here: https://muzamilhasan.com/podcast/apply Join the Inner Circle, my weekly letter on AI, building, and being early to what's coming: https://muzamilhasan.com/inner-circle... Read the thesis, the one idea behind everything I'm building: https://muzamilhasan.com/thesis My website: https://muzamilhasan.com Checkout the platform: https://ilmverse.ai/ Is Artificial Intelligence inherently biased against Muslims, and could it be the ultimate theological threat? In this episode of the Thought Behind Things podcast, I sit down with Shahbaaz Khan, Project Head at Ilmverse (a global initiative by SISL, Al-Kawthar University), to discuss how they built a trusted Islamic AI companion using 8.5 million pages of authenticated religious texts. While frontier AI models like ChatGPT and Claude are powerful, they are built with Western worldviews and often fail to provide culturally or religiously accurate counseling for Muslims. We dive deep into the dangers of relying on Western AI for Islamic knowledge, the monumental task of scanning and cleaning centuries of Fiqh and Hadith into a RAG pipeline, and the controversial debate: Is AI the Dajjal? We also discuss why democratizing Islamic scholarship is the only way to bypass fake scholars and gatekeepers who exploit the masses. If you want to know how the Muslim world is preparing for the intelligence era, watch this until the end! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro: the AI series and building with purpose 2:10 Claude getting opinionated and what it means for Eastern users 4:21 Shahbaaz Khan on SISL and Al-Kawthar University 5:38 What Ilm is: a trusted AI companion with sources 9:11 Sign-up friction, app downloads and active users 14:05 Under the hood: models, RAG and the data layer 18:30 Video verification and keeping Ilm sustainable 22:01 Where the data comes from: books, Arabic OCR and permissions 29:00 Research papers, universities and the psychology dataset 31:13 Muslims and technology: is AI the Dajjal? 33:50 The awareness gap and the Ilm Dialogue podcast 38:39 The Pope's AI statement and what our children will debate 41:14 Democratizing access to Islamic knowledge Instagram:   / muzamilhasan   LinkedIn:   / muzamilhasan