Reflections from the Muslims in AI Event 2025 at Imperial College London
Alhamdulillah.
Recently, I had the honour of speaking at the Muslims in AI 2025 event hosted at Imperial College London, where I shared Greentech Apps Foundation’s journey and ongoing work in Islamic Computing — how we use AI, data, and human-centred design to empower Islamic education at scale.
The response to the talk was very encouraging. Alongside thoughtful questions during the session, many valuable conversations continued afterwards. I met users of Sadiq and SearchDeen who shared how these tools have supported their learning and daily practice. One brother remarked that it was refreshing to see that GTAF is working across many areas — not only Quran. That comment, simple as it was, meant a great deal to us.
It reflected years of intentional research and development work that often happens quietly behind the scenes, guided by a clear mission and long-term vision.
🎥 Watch the Talk
The full talk is available on YouTube:
👉 Islamic Computing: How GTAF Uses AI to Empower Islamic Education
https://youtu.be/u0CtkgttL5Y?si=jIHNaLUEi4rpmdQQ&t=3890
(Timestamped to the start of the talk)
📑 Slides from the Talk
The presentation slides are available here:
We are sharing the slides openly to encourage learning, discussion, and collaboration within the wider Muslim tech and research community, insha’Allah.
Islamic Computing: More Than Just Apps
At GTAF, we describe our R&D direction as Islamic Computing — a space that brings together:
- Authentic Islamic scholarship
- Artificial Intelligence and data science
- Human–Computer Interaction (HCI)
- Learning theory and educational psychology
Our focus is not on novelty for its own sake, but on asking principled questions:
How can technology genuinely help Muslims understand Islam better and practice it with confidence?
Alhamdulillah, over the past 10 years, GTAF has served millions of users worldwide across Quran, Hadith, Seerah, Dua, and newer AI-powered tools. What is less visible is the research infrastructure underneath these products — the pipelines, evaluations, scholar review processes, and design decisions that make them trustworthy and scalable.
What We Shared at the Event
During the talk, several strands of our R&D work were highlighted:
AI-Assisted Quran & Islamic Quiz Generation
We have developed pipelines that generate structured, explanation-based Islamic questions from Quran, Tafsir, Hadith, and Seerah. These are scholar-reviewed before public use and already power GTAF’s global quizzes. This work is also laying the foundation for a future interactive Islamic quiz platform — often described as “Kahoot for Islam.”
Hadith Narrator Chain (Isnād) Analysis
Our research includes automated extraction and analysis of Hadith narrator chains from Arabic texts. The system resolves ambiguities such as kinship references and duplicate narrators, while explicitly flagging uncertain cases for scholar review. AI here supports scale, not authority.
SearchDeen: RAG-Powered Islamic Search
SearchDeen applies retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) across Quran, Hadith, and Seerah corpora to improve discoverability and contextual understanding. Rather than replacing traditional scholarship, it acts as an intelligent navigation layer that helps users explore connections across Islamic sources more effectively.
Conversations After the Talk
Some of the most meaningful outcomes came after the presentation itself:
- Meeting users who have quietly benefited from GTAF tools
- Engaging with Muslim researchers and engineers thinking deeply about ethics, grounding, and evaluation in AI
- Reconnecting with GTAF loyalists, who expressed interest in discussing a new app / web-app idea he hopes we can explore together, insha’Allah
These interactions remind us that credibility is built slowly — through consistency, sincerity, and a willingness to engage openly with the community.
Slowly, Steadily, With Barakah
GTAF is not trying to “win” a single product category. We are building an ecosystem of tools, research, and people, rooted in service to the Ummah.
Our R&D team is small and distributed across the UK, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, but united by a shared intention:
that this work is fī sabīlillāh and a form of ṣadaqah jāriyah.
Alhamdulillah, events like Muslims in AI are gentle reminders that the effort is being noticed, trusted, and — most importantly — used.
If you are a researcher, developer, designer, or organisation interested in collaborating, we would love to hear from you. And to our users: your trust, feedback, and duʿāʾ are what keep this work grounded.
May Allah place barakah in all sincere efforts.
Dr Riasat Islam
Head of R&D, Greentech Apps Foundation
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