I built Islam & AI in 2023. Registered a UK company for it, told myself I was serious, then let that company dissolve without ever taking a payment through it.

It kept running anyway. Three years, 145,000 users, 193 countries, out of my own pocket — about $30 a month, which I only worked out recently.

The whole time, one piece of feedback kept arriving in different words: can I do this with my friends?

I didn’t understand it at first. The product worked as it should: you asked a question about a verse or a narration, you got an explanation with the reference, you went and checked it on Quran.com or Sunnah.com. What was missing?

What was missing is the oldest thing in Islamic learning.

Nobody learned this deen alone. You sat in a circle. Someone asked a question, and the answer wasn’t just for them — it was for everyone sitting there. Someone else pushed back. Someone remembered a related narration. The knowledge moved sideways through a room, not down a wire into one person’s head.

That’s a halaqa. It predates every institution we have. And somehow the internet, which connected everything, never built a good version of it.

So: Halaqa Groups.

You create a circle and get an invite code. You share it with friends, or your family, or the people you already study with but never see. Every question anyone asks, and every answer with its references, posts to the shared thread. Everyone sees it. Everyone learns from questions they wouldn’t have thought to ask.

It’s private — invite only, nobody outside sees it. The creator can moderate: remove messages, remove members, delete the circle. A hundred questions a day per group, and one Pro member lifts the cap for the whole circle, which is deliberate: one person can carry the room.

On what this is and isn’t

Group AI chat isn’t new. OpenAI shipped it last year. What doesn’t exist — as far as I can find — is a shared study space built for one tradition, where every answer carries a reference you can go and check, and where the thing explicitly refuses to give you a ruling.

That last part matters most, and it’s the part I’d defend hardest.

Islam & AI is not a mufti. It will never be a mufti. Ask it something that needs a ruling and it will tell you what the mainstream positions are, show you where they come from, and then tell you to go to a qualified scholar. That isn’t a legal disclaimer I bolted on. It’s the design.

There’s a version of this product that would be far more popular if it just answered confidently. I’m not building that one. Confidence about the deen, from software, at scale, is a genuinely a dangerous thing to put into the world, and most of the harm wouldn’t be visible until much later.

What it costs

Nothing. Core chat is free and stays free. Not free-for-now, not free-with-a-catch.

There are paid tiers because $30 a month grows as more people use it, and I’d rather this be sustainable than have it quietly disappear the year I get busy. One of them lets you buy access for someone who can’t pay. Sadaqah jariyah, in the shape the internet allows.

Start one

Pick three people. Create a circle. Send them the code. You’ll be surprised what questions other people ask!

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