Ethical Challenges of AI Applications in Sīrah Studies: Epistemic Integrity, Sacred Representation, and Responsible Governance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68696/d95st916Keywords:
Sīrah Studies, Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Islamic Ethics, Digital Humanities, Religious Authority, Source Provenance, AI GovernanceAbstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving from a peripheral digital tool to an active mediator of religious knowledge. In Sīrah studies, this shift creates substantial opportunities for corpus search, text mining, prosopography, social-network analysis, chronology, mapping, translation, manuscript support, and educational access. Yet the field is unusually sensitive to errors because its subject is the life, mission, words, actions, and historical reception of the Prophet Muhammad, and because historical claims are evaluated through layered source traditions rather than through textual similarity alone. This article examines the ethical challenges of AI applications in Sīrah studies through an integrative critical review of recent scholarship, prioritizing peer-reviewed literature published from 2024 to 20 August 2026, together with foundational work in Sīrah historiography and contemporary AI governance. A structured scenario analysis evaluates six common AI-assisted Sīrah workflows across seven ethical dimensions: source provenance, contextual integrity, sacred sensitivity, pluralism and bias, transparency, scholarly authority, and privacy/copyright. The analysis finds the highest risks in public question-answering, thematic interpretation, source citation, translation, and synthetic reconstruction. The central problems are not limited to hallucination; they include invented or displaced attribution, loss of isnād and source hierarchy, false chronological certainty, cultural and sectarian flattening, algorithmic authority, opaque model updates, and ethically problematic representation or simulated speech. The article proposes a SĪRAH-AI Responsible Use Framework built on Source provenance, Isnād and context integrity, Reverence and representation, Accountability and auditability, and Human scholarly authority. It concludes that AI can responsibly augment Sīrah scholarship when used within curated corpora, explicit provenance rules, qualified human review, uncertainty disclosure, and reproducible research documentation, but it should not function as an autonomous authority for authentication or final religious-historical judgment.
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