WE ARE LIVING through a remarkable technological transformation.
Artificial intelligence can now generate images, voices and videos increasingly indistinguishable from reality. A photograph of a child at school can be manipulated into something sexualised, causing very real humiliation, bullying and psychological harm.
Schools, pupils and parents are being told not to share pictures on social media. Governments are responding with new laws. Companies are being asked to improve safeguards. Police and regulators are trying to catch up.
But beneath all of this sits a deeper question: What happens when a society develops extraordinary technological power without an equally coherent moral framework for deciding how that power should be used?
The limits of individual choice
Modern liberal societies are built around a powerful principle: individual autonomy.
Adults should generally be free to choose what they believe, consume, say and do, provided they stay within the law and do not directly violate the rights of others. This protects freedom of conscience and limits arbitrary state power.
It also creates a difficult question: What happens when millions of individually permissible choices collectively produce a harmful culture?
Pornography involving consenting adults is legal across much of the Western world. The principle is straightforward: adults are autonomous and should generally be allowed to make their own choices.
But children do not experience society through neat legal categories. They grow up surrounded by smartphones, social media, advertising and recommendation algorithms tuned to adult appetites. Material produced for adults inevitably becomes part of the environment in which children are raised. And AI-generated sexual imagery makes the problem worse.
Things become even more complicated when individual autonomy is combined with commercialisation.
Modern markets are extraordinarily effective at responding to human desire. If something attracts attention, generates clicks, subscriptions, advertising revenue or sales, there are powerful incentives to produce more of it.
The system does not need anyone to consciously decide that society should become more sexually permissive. A business responds to demand. A platform responds to engagement. An advertiser responds to attention. A consumer responds to desire.
Millions of individually rational decisions can lead to a culture that nobody consciously designed. Over time, the market can normalise things that previous generations regarded as exceptional.
Technology then accelerates the process. Something that once required considerable effort can suddenly be produced almost instantly. Something that was previously difficult to distribute can reach thousands or millions of people within moments.
AI is therefore not creating every one of these problems from nothing. It is magnifying existing cultural and economic forces.
And that is what makes deepfakes so revealing. They expose what happens when individual desire, commercial incentives and technological power are allowed to develop faster than the moral restraints governing them.
The space between legal and illegal
Something may be technologically possible without being morally acceptable. Legal without being beneficial. Profitable without being good for society.
Law is not the same thing as morality. And when a society increasingly relies on law to define the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, everything outside those boundaries can begin to look morally neutral.
That is a dangerous assumption.
A healthy society needs more than criminal law. There is an enormous space between “you are free to do this” and “you should go to prison for doing this.”
Historically, that space was held by family, religion, community, reputation, shared moral expectations and conscience. These restraints act before a crime occurs, not after.
A person might avoid doing something not because the police would arrest them, but because their parents taught them it was wrong, their community condemned it, their religion prohibited it, or their own conscience would not allow it.
As those forms of restraint weaken, societies lean ever more heavily on legislation to solve problems legislation was never designed to solve.
The law can prohibit exploitation and punish it after the fact. It cannot make someone modest. It cannot create self-restraint. It cannot place an officer inside every bedroom, phone or computer.
Islam begins before the law
This is where Islam has something different to offer.
Islam does not begin with the question, “What can the state legally prevent me from doing?” It begins with a more fundamental one: What does Allah require of me?
At the heart of this is taqwa: the consciousness that Allah sees us, knows us and will hold us accountable, even when nobody else does.
Allah says:
وَٱتَّقُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ وَٱعْلَمُوٓا۟ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ بَصِيرٌۭ
Be mindful of Allah, and know that Allah is All-Seeing of what you do. (al-Baqarah 233)
A person may hide behind an anonymous account, a foreign platform or the privacy of their own room, confident that nobody will ever know.
The person with taqwa asks a different question. Not, “Can I get away with this?” But: “What will Allah think of what I am doing?”
That restraint is internal. It does not depend upon surveillance or the threat of punishment.
Islam is also concerned with what our choices do to our character over time, not only whether we cross a legal line. What we repeatedly consume and practise shapes what we desire. What we desire shapes who we become.
This is part of the wisdom behind haya and the broader project of purifying the soul. Islam is not merely concerned with preventing harmful acts. It asks what kind of human being is being formed by them.
Technology changes. Moral principles do not.
A society that constructs its moral boundaries only in response to technology is permanently playing catch-up.
New tools create new possibilities. Some of those possibilities cause new harms. Society debates a response. Legislation eventually follows. Then another technology arrives.
Islam begins somewhere else.
The Qur’an did not mention artificial intelligence, smartphones, social media or deepfakes. It did not need to.
The moral questions existed long before the technology. Honour, dignity, modesty, deception, slander, sexual immorality, exploitation, harm, accountability all existed.
A deepfake may be technologically unprecedented. The moral questions it creates are not. The question is: How should this technology be judged according to principles that revelation has already established?
This gives Islam a stable starting point when confronting technological change. Every new technology does not require morality to be built again from scratch.
Islam is more than personal morality
Much of Muslim discourse stops here.
We can rightly identify the importance of taqwa and personal virtue, and still end up reducing Islam to a collection of private pieties.
That is not the Islamic conception of society.
Taqwa restrains the individual who has it. But what happens when someone does not have taqwa? What happens when a platform profits from exploitation? When a company has no commercial reason to restrain itself? When powerful technological systems amplify harmful material? When someone’s dignity is deliberately violated?
A civilisation cannot answer these problems with personal piety alone.
This is why Islam distributes moral responsibility rather than resting it entirely on the individual. Family and community cultivate values and hold people to shared expectations. Political authority establishes public order, protects people from serious harm and regulates matters of public interest. But that authority is itself a trust.
ٱلَّذِينَ إِن مَّكَّنَّـٰهُمْ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ أَقَامُوا۟ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَءَاتَوُا۟ ٱلزَّكَوٰةَ وَأَمَرُوا۟ بِٱلْمَعْرُوفِ وَنَهَوْا۟ عَنِ ٱلْمُنكَرِ ۗ وَلِلَّهِ عَـٰقِبَةُ ٱلْأُمُورِ
[And they are] those who, if We give them authority in the land, establish prayer and give zakāh and enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong. And to Allāh belongs the outcome of [all] matters. (al Hajj 41)
Political authority is therefore not a licence. Nor is it the source of morality. It operates within the same moral order it is responsible for upholding.
Each layer does work the others cannot. Taqwa without an accompanying social and political order leaves the public sphere vulnerable to people who have no taqwa. Law without taqwa can produce compliance without character. Community without political authority can be overwhelmed by commercial and technological forces larger than it. And political authority without accountability can become tyranny.
Islam therefore cannot be reduced either to private spirituality or to a collection of laws. It provides a way of life in which the individual, family, community and political authority each have responsibilities and operate within boundaries established by revelation.
A Civilisation Capable of Absorbing Technological Change
The technological challenge facing humanity is not simply that machines are becoming more powerful. It is that human capability is expanding faster than some societies’ ability to establish moral boundaries around that capability.
Deepfakes are one example. There will be others. Technology will continue to change. New capabilities will emerge. Some will bring enormous benefit. Others will create forms of harm that are difficult even to imagine today.
Muslims therefore need more than technical literacy. We need the confidence to approach technological change from within our own intellectual and ethical tradition. We need scholars capable of ijtihad, understanding new technologies and applying Islamic principles to them. And we need to recover an understanding of Islam that is not confined to private belief and personal ethics.
Islam’s answer is not to reject technology, human capability or freedom. It is to place them within a higher order. An order in which freedom exists within responsibility. Political power exists within accountability. The market exists within ethical limits. And technology exists within morality.
For far too long, Islam has been seen as reactive to technology, with fiqh trailing behind Western innovation, always catching up.
Islam does not need technology to slow down. It supplies something liberal market societies lack: a way of saying no to something legal, profitable and widely wanted.
Autonomy can’t do that. The market can’t do that. At best, it can produce a not yet.
Some will point out that plenty of non-religious people find deepfakes abhorrent too. True, but that is conscience doing work the surrounding system provides no real support for and depends on enough people feeling the same way before the harm spreads.
Islam does not wait for consensus to emerge after the harm has spread. The moral boundary exists before the technology does.
Islam has never had a problem with technology. The challenge is whether Muslims have the confidence to offer the Islamic framework within which technological power should operate. Not a religion catching up with modern life, but a complete way of life capable of governing the power that modern life has unleashed.
