INVESTIGATING ISLAM

Part 2 – From Orientalism to Algorithms

The Genealogy of Representing Islam

Introduction: Islam as a Packaged Object

Islam has never been a single voice. It has always been contested, plural, and alive with disagreement. Yet outsiders — and often insiders — have spent centuries trying to package it as a neat, stable “thing” that can be explained, studied, or sold.

The latest package is AI Islam: a machine-generated version of the faith, produced by algorithms. But AI Islam did not appear in a vacuum. It is the newest chapter in a long history of attempts to capture Islam in textual form.

This essay traces that genealogy, from Orientalist scholarship in the 19th century to apologetic daʿwah in the 20th, to digital fatwa banks in the 21st — and finally to the algorithmic simulacrum we now call AI Islam. By seeing the lineage, we can see both continuity and rupture: AI Islam inherits from its predecessors, yet it also represents a radical break.

1. Orientalist Islam: The Archive as Authority

In the 18th and 19th centuries, European empires expanded into Muslim-majority lands. Alongside soldiers and merchants came Orientalists — scholars who studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts to unlock the culture and religion of the “Orient.”

1.1 Text Mining the Qur’an

Orientalists treated Islam primarily as a textual archive. The Qur’an was dissected, catalogued, and translated. Hadith collections were mined for contradictions. Law manuals were classified and compared.

The aim was not to understand Islam as lived practice, but to objectify it as something that could be studied, categorized, and ultimately controlled.
The result was what Edward Said later called textual Islam — an Islam stripped of context, turned into a manageable object.

1.2 Islam as the “Other”

This project was not neutral. It often carried assumptions of superiority. Islam was portrayed as:

rigid compared to Christianity,
stagnant compared to Europe,
irrational compared to Enlightenment rationality.

In this framing, Islam was not a living tradition but a problem to be explained, contained, and ruled.

2. Apologetic Islam: The Counter-Narrative

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Muslim reformers began to push back. Thinkers like Rashid Rida, Muhammad Abduh, and later Abul Aʿla Mawdudi sought to reclaim Islam from Orientalist distortions.

2.1 Streamlining the Faith

To counter colonial critiques, reformers produced their own simplified packages of Islam:

“Islam is rational.”
“Islam is compatible with science.”
“Islam is the complete system for life.”

This was not the Islam of messy jurisprudence or local customs. It was a purified Islam, designed to show the West — and fellow Muslims — that the faith was modern, universal, and defensible.

2.2 The Rise of “The Real Islam”

This apologetic impulse gave rise to slogans still common today:

“Islam is a religion of peace.”
“The Qur’an is perfect guidance.”
“Shariʿa is divine law for all times.”

The irony: in resisting Orientalist simplifications, reformers produced their own simplifications. Islam was cleansed of historical baggage, cultural practices, and internal disputes. It was marketed as “The Real Islam.”

3. Digital Islam: The Internet Era

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Islam entered the digital age. Suddenly, fatwas, sermons, and Qur’an translations were a few clicks away.

3.1 Fatwa Banks

Websites like Islam Q&A and Ask the Scholar offered searchable databases of rulings. Any Muslim — or curious outsider — could now type a question and get an instant answer.

“Is music halal or haram?”
“Can Muslims celebrate birthdays?”
“What is the Islamic ruling on women traveling without a mahram?”

The responses were delivered with certainty and authority, but they often reflected specific ideological agendas — usually conservative Salafi or Wahhabi positions.

3.2 YouTube Preachers

With video platforms, charismatic figures like Zakir Naik or Mufti Menk gained global followings. Islam became soundbites and sermons, detached from context and tailored for digital virality.

3.3 Wikipedia Islam

Crowdsourced platforms further flattened the faith into encyclopedic entries. Disputes were smoothed into consensus-sounding summaries.

The result: Islam became instantly accessible, universally searchable, and increasingly standardized. But like Orientalist and apologetic Islams, this was still a curated Islam — shaped by who controlled the platforms.

4. AI Islam: The Algorithmic Break

Enter AI. Unlike Orientalists, apologists, or online preachers, AI does not consciously interpret. It predicts text based on statistical patterns in training data.

And yet, the results look authoritative:

Ask about hijab, and it gives a “balanced” synthesis.
Ask about jihad, and it emphasizes spiritual struggle over legal warfare.
Ask about alcohol, and it simply says “forbidden,” skipping centuries of debate.

4.1 Inheritor and Mutant

AI Islam inherits from all three predecessors:

From Orientalists: it treats Islam as an object that can be explained in neat form.
From apologists: it offers a smoothed, “reasonable” version that hides conflict.
From digital Islam: it universalizes rulings and makes them instantly accessible.

But AI Islam is also a radical mutation:

It is not produced by scholars or ideologues, but by code.
It has no conscious agenda, yet it reproduces the biases of its data.
It projects neutrality, even while curating heavily.

4.2 The Aura of Neutrality

This is the crucial break. Orientalists were European. Apologists were Muslim reformers. Fatwa sites were conservative clerics. Each could be located, critiqued, or resisted.

AI Islam? It is a machine. It seems nobody’s Islam. And that illusion makes it more powerful than all its predecessors combined.

5. Continuity and Rupture

So is AI Islam just the latest phase in representing Islam, or is it something fundamentally new? The answer is both.

Continuity: Like Orientalists, apologists, and digital platforms, AI Islam flattens Islam into an object for outsiders.
Rupture: Unlike them, it does so without human authorship. The algorithm is the new mufti, the new Orientalist, the new apologist.

This rupture matters because it severs representation from accountability. You cannot argue with AI Islam’s agenda because it has no conscious agenda. Yet it is no less biased — only harder to challenge.

6. Implications of the Genealogy

Tracing this lineage shows us two things:

The trajectory was always toward simplification. From Orientalist archives to daʿwah slogans to fatwa banks, Islam has been progressively reduced into clean, digestible packages. AI Islam is simply the most extreme version yet.
The break is in authority. Every earlier stage was authored — by scholars, reformers, or clerics. AI Islam is authored by no one. Its authority comes from its very lack of authorship. It speaks with the voice of “the machine,” which in today’s world is often taken as more reliable than any human.

Conclusion: The Genealogy Complete

AI Islam is not an accident. It is the product of two centuries of efforts to package Islam for consumption. Orientalists classified it, apologists defended it, websites digitized it — and now algorithms simulate it.

But AI Islam is also a rupture. For the first time, Islam has been taken out of human hands altogether and delivered as a machine simulacrum.

That is why AI Islam feels so authoritative, so neutral, and so inevitable. But that is also why it is so dangerous: it is Islam without Muslims, Islam without history, Islam without debate.

In the next part of this series, we will look closely at how AI Islam generates its authority through the algorithmic average — and why this “moderate middle” is not a virtue, but a distortion.

Next in series Part 3 The Algorithmic Average