But in 2022, his mother died of stomach cancer. The following Ramadan, Kazi found himself without someone reliable to check his recitation during taraweeh—the special voluntary nighttime prayers performed during that month—for mistakes. So he turned to AI.
Tarteel is now commonplace in many mosques across the world. During this year’s Ramadan alone, it facilitated over six million hours of Quran engagement in over 180 countries, the company says. And the app is a prime example of how AI tools have become increasingly incorporated into Muslim religious practice. Imams use AI tools to help them write sermons, students use them to memorize the Quran, and everyday practitioners turn to chatbots for religious or spiritual advice. “If it's done correctly, it can really lead to people developing a better understanding of their faith,” says Waleed Kadous, a technologist and founder of the Muslim AI ethics organization IASER.
For individual users like Kazi, AI has introduced a profound tension in how they practice and preserve their faith. AI tools offer real benefits, but at the potential cost of the human connection that has been the bedrock of Islam and other religions for millennia.
Tarteel was created by Muslim technologists long before the current AI boom, and for personal reasons. In 2019, Canadian technologist Mohamed Moussa lamented his relationship with the Quran, a text which has been painstakingly preserved in its original Arabic for 1,400 years. Memorizing the Quran is a science in and of itself in the Islamic faith; the book is considered to be the unchanged, exact word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Islamic credo teaches that the more one memorizes the Quran, the higher one’s rank in heaven.
Tarteel is far from the only project in this space. In Mountain View, Calif., the technologist Waleed Kadous created an AI assistant called Ansari that is trained on Islamic sources and answers faith-related questions. Kadous says that Ansari has answered 150,000 queries from users, including imams seeking guidance for writing sermons on short notice, or individuals asking whether they can eat shrimp off of a plate that also has pork on it.
Concerns with mainstream AI platforms
Kadous has reservations about creating certain AI tools for Muslims. Still, he believes Muslims need alternatives of their own, especially as many already seek advice from mainstream AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude—and those platforms have a mixed history of accurately conveying Islamic ideals. Kadous says that a year ago, ChatGPT was telling Muslims they needed to wash their knees before praying, which is not part of the Islamic wudu cleansing practice required before each prayer.
Other Muslims have had negative experiences with asking ChatGPT faith-based questions, including Aaminah Basent, a 26-year-old who spoke to TIME under a pseudonym due to privacy concerns. When she moved from the Muslim enclave of Michigan’s Detroit Metro area to Santa Barbara, Calif. in 2025, she felt like the population there was staring at and judging her for wearing a hijab. “It did start to weigh on me a lot,” she says, “because you can feel when you're constantly in the center of attention.”
For Basent, removing the headscarf—which serves as a physical representation of her faith—would have been a major renunciation of her beliefs, and one she was not at all prepared for. She had turned to ChatGPT for emotional support, but she says it had responded by effectively questioning her value system.
Basent still ponders her experience with the bot, and why it answered the way it did. “Why didn't it give advice about how I can be firm in my beliefs—how to have more confidence in how I’m showing up, and how I’m different? Why did it choose that advice?” Basent now studies at The Miftaah Institute, an Islamic seminary in Michigan, where she says she still uses AI for help with simple Arabic translation, but not much otherwise.
A growing number of apps offer AI standing in for a religious authority altogether. These platforms let users pose questions about Islamic law, practice, and theology to a chatbot rather than a human scholar. WisQu, a Shia-focused AI platform, markets itself on a "96% accuracy rate" in responding to religious queries. Meanwhile, the app Your Imam goes further, inviting users to chat with their "Personal Imam and Guide"—complete with an AI-generated bearded avatar meant to evoke a stereotypical religious figure.
“There's a very famous hadith [narration] of the Prophet Muhammad,” he says, “and the essence of the hadith is that, towards the end of time, true scholarship will be taken away, and the only thing that will remain is ignorance. And ignorance will actually be taken as true knowledge.”
Building the Muslim stack
But Muslim technologists believe that the only way forward is to be part of the process—to improve mainstream AI tools while crafting their own. To address the former issue, members of the Tarteel team built an MCP server atop ChatGPT and Claude so that those chatbots correctly reference the Quran and Islamic literature and don’t hallucinate verses. They also built an open-source Quranic Universal Library, upon which other builders can create their own apps—including one that forces users to recite a Quran verse to unlock specific apps.
In any other context, a house of God smattered with people staring at their phones, trusting AI to speak to them, might feel sacrilegious. But Tarteel’s users believe it could deepen their devotion—as long as they continue to center humanity in their faith.
“We should adapt with the technology,” Kazi says. “But if you really, really want to learn the Quran, then having the human element there will help you progress higher in that journey.”
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