A Tool, Not a Sheikh: Religious Perceptions of AI in Muslim Reddit Communities

Generative AI is increasingly used for religious information, learning, and guidance, yet little is known about how it is perceived in Muslim-oriented online communities. We collected a large-scale Reddit corpus of 439,099 posts (November 2022–August 2026) from 26 Muslim-oriented communities and identifying 1,557 AI–Islam posts and 19,341 associated comments through a multi-stage, LLM-validated filtering pipeline. Using LLM-assisted, human-validated annotation and thematic analysis, we examine religious AI usage, perceived benefits and risks, sentiment, and community responses. Participants discussed AI most often for religious guidance and permissibility, religious education and outreach, and scriptural research. AI was viewed favorably for Qur'anic learning, devotional practice, and practical religious decision-making, while concerns centered on unreliable guidance, deception, privacy harms, and religious misrepresentation. Community responses were predominantly neutral or invalidating rather than validating or escalatory, with scriptural and theological uses receiving greater corrective pushback. AI was thus neither simply accepted nor rejected: its legitimacy depended on context, particularly whether it functioned as a tool or a source of religious authority.