Egypt’s Grand Mufti says AI can aid fatwas but not replace scholars

Religious institutions are quietly becoming another important class of AI deployers. Egypt’s Dar al‑Ifta handles millions of religious queries each year, and its decision to build an AI‑assisted fatwa app signals both operational pressure and a desire to stay relevant to a digital‑native public. The Grand Mufti’s framing—AI as a tool that must remain subordinate to human scholars—echoes similar language from courts and regulators, but in a domain where perceived spiritual authority is at stake.

For the AGI race, this is a reminder that alignment isn’t just about technical safety; it’s also about compatibility with deeply held worldviews. As models become more capable of generating plausible religious reasoning, institutions will face pressure to either embrace them as research assistants or condemn them as illegitimate competitors. Dar al‑Ifta is taking a middle path: use models to surface and structure precedent, but keep final judgment human.

Strategically, the move could spur demand across the Muslim world for locally trained, theologically constrained models, particularly in Arabic. That opens space for regional AI companies and for open‑weight models fine‑tuned on religious corpora, while also raising hard questions about bias, sectarian differences and who controls the training data.