By Amhar Rasyid
Jambi, February 20th, 2026
It is interesting to listen to the discussion of both Yuval Noah Harari and Luciano Huck on the YouTube titled The Idea for the Future. What makes me so interested in is that reading the texts in the future, according to Harari, will be taken over by the new agent is called AI (Artificial Intelligence) and I imagine its probable implications to the religious texts particularly in Islamic tradition. I assume that it will modify, in its turn, the method of deducing laws from the sacred texts. If it were true, to what extent will it surpass the deductive process in understanding God’s law compared to the longstanding method of ‘Bayani’? This discussion, hopefully, will contribute to enhance the understanding of the Muslim youth on the impact of the AI on the new trend of interpreting the sacred texts.
Firstly, what kind of the nature of AI? AI is a program that perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence. To perform the task, AI has a different way from, let say, coffee machines said Yuval. Usually when a man buys some coffee, the machine will operate technically as it had been programmed by the inventor. While the AI will ask you first and give some references for a better coffee to drink which may benefit to your health thanks to the available data of your prior medical records. This is because the AI knows better than you do about the interrelationships of the previous accumulated your medical data and the present situation. Unfortunately, AI does not have, said Yuval, psychological and emotional considerations which man has. Nevertheless its nature is far more sophisticated than that of machine.
Next, what is actually happening when someone thinks? According to Yuval, when someone is thinking, he is putting certain words, graphs, pictures in his mind in order to communicate with the others. But beneath the spoken words, graphs or pictures lay the empirical elements that AI does not have. Such empirical elements, not only cognition and intelligence but also mind, and social skill. Nevertheless, the AI may recover such a remote memory over generations in human history. Thanks to its Big Data, AI can recall, in the domain of priest for example, the views and arguments of the earlier priests contained in each piece of chapters or pages of certain classical religious books in which the present priests cannot do the same way.
It is therefore meaningful to relate the AI’s superiority to the method of bayani. What is bayani? The Bayani method is one of Islamic epistemological approaches that prioritizes sacred texts and linguistic analysis to establish truth, viewing it as the primary source of knowledge says Google. Here one may assume that whenever the Muslim scholars (ulama, da’i, mufti, preacher, legal jurist) apply the bayani method in interpreting and understanding texts, they may start interpreting it by their own Presuppositions as the basis of his later understanding according to Gadamer. It means that such Presuppositions signify his own contemporary world, as well as its constrains to the remote and multiple pages of certain classical books which are now being out of his reach. It is here the AI will take over.
Based on the discussion above, one may now imagine of how wide will be the gap between the horizons of the muslim scholars and that of AI. Whenever a Muslim scholar cites an opinion of, say, a classical ulama of Thabi’in or after on certain legal issue of Islamic law, AI will be able to recollect more precisely of such classical opinions, arguments, textual proofs, scriptural evidences, as well as legal authorities cited. Moreover, AI will also be able to indicate in which pages, even lines, commas, dots, or sub-titles of such arguments of the Thabiin may be found regardless the multi volumes of his work. Thus memorizing the Yellow Books (Kitab Kuning) at Pesantren (Traditional Islamic Boarding Schools) will be questioned. There will be no longer prevail the long standing traditional system of learning by heart at Pesantren. This is mainly due to the limitedness of our horizons compared to that of AI.
It is not just the tradition of text readings at Pesantrens per se. I think all of classical texts will be encroached by AI, including the recordings of our ancestral marital status and genealogy. What will happen after 10 years in future no one can predict it precisely. One thing to do is to understand what is actually happening and how can we make sure everything is for good or for bad. Thank you Mr. Yuval.
