Ask a question

What it is

Fanar-Sadiq is an assistant for questions about Islam, in Arabic and English. It is part of Fanar, the Arabic-first AI platform built by the Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and is open to the public free of charge.

How it answers

It first works out what kind of question it has been asked, then hands it to the right tool. For a question of fiqh it searches its library, writes the answer from the passages it finds, and attaches them as numbered sources. It does not answer from memory alone.

What it can do

• Answer questions of belief, worship and fiqh, with sources
• Quote a verse of the Qur’an word for word from the stored text
• Work out zakat and Sunni inheritance shares by fixed rules
• Prayer times and Qibla, Hijri dates, and supplications

Its library

More than 500,000 documents: the Qur’an, the major hadith collections, classical books of fiqh, contemporary fatwas, Islamic history and scholarly articles.

How well it does

Its makers tested it on five public sets of Islamic questions. It answered about 76% correctly on average, close to the largest general AI systems (77–80%) and well ahead of general Arabic models. It was used about 1.9 million times in under a year, and 77% of the answers people rated were liked.

Its limits

It does not replace a qualified scholar and does not issue binding fatwas. An answer is only as good as the library behind it: a source can be missing, a difference of opinion can be summed up too briefly, and about one answer in four on those tests was wrong. Check the sources, and take a ruling on your own situation to a scholar.

Urdu

The Urdu beside an answer is a machine translation by Fanar’s general model. It can mistranslate a term of fiqh, so the Arabic or English answer stays on screen as the one to rely on.