A Malaysian university convenes scholars on AI and Maqasid al-Shariah

The International Islamic University Malaysia is hosting the 7th International Conference on Islamic Jurisprudence (ICIJ2026), an academic gathering that examines artificial intelligence through the classical framework of Maqasid al-Shariah -- the higher objectives of Islamic law, such as preserving intellect, faith, life, lineage and property. The conference brings together researchers, academics and practitioners to address themes including AI's relationship to human intellect and reasoning, and the use of AI tools in fatwa deliberation and other religious-scholarship processes. Rather than treating AI governance as a purely technical or purely theological question, the conference's premise is that maqasid -- a framework built to weigh competing goods and harms across centuries of jurisprudence -- is already suited to evaluating a technology that raises exactly those competing-goods tradeoffs. It is one of several 2026 academic venues (alongside peer-reviewed journal work on maqasid-based AI governance) treating this as a live research area rather than a settled one, which is itself worth tracking: the frameworks being built now will likely inform how Islamic institutions eventually write AI policy rather than just react to it.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at International Islamic University Malaysia: https://conference.iium.edu.my/icij26/.