Frequently Asked Questions
Last updated: · اقرأها بالعربية
What is ShAIkhy?
ShAIkhy (Arabic: شيخي, “my sheikh”) is a free, open-source AI Islamic research engine. You ask a question in Arabic or English; it searches over 440,000 indexed passages of classical Islamic scholarship — Quran, hadith, tafsir, and fiqh — and writes an answer in which every claim is linked to the exact source passage it came from.
Is ShAIkhy really free?
Yes. There are no ads, no subscriptions, and no paywalls. ShAIkhy is built as a mission project for the ummah, not a business. A free account (Google or email) is required to ask questions.
Does ShAIkhy issue fatwas?
No. ShAIkhy is a research tool, not a mufti. It presents evidence — Quranic verses, graded hadith, and the documented positions of the four madhabs — so you can see what the sources say. For a ruling that affects your life, consult a qualified scholar.
What sources does ShAIkhy search?
The corpus contains over 440,000 passages from the classical Islamic library (turath): the Quran, the major hadith collections with scholarly gradings (including Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim), classical tafsir and fiqh works across all four madhabs, and more than 56,000 entries from dictionaries of Islamic terminology. Sources are ranked by trust tier, with the Quran and Sahih collections surfaced first.
How does ShAIkhy prevent AI hallucination?
ShAIkhy retrieves before it writes: the model may only answer from passages actually found in the corpus. After generation, a citation-verification step checks every reference in the answer against the retrieved source text. When confidence is low, the answer says so explicitly — and when no source is found, ShAIkhy says that instead of inventing one.
How is ShAIkhy different from asking ChatGPT about Islam?
General chatbots answer Islamic questions from statistical memory, and published evaluations document misattributed verses, fabricated hadith, and uneven madhab accuracy. ShAIkhy retrieves real classical texts first, shows you each source — book, passage, and hadith grading — and declines to answer rather than fabricate.
Does ShAIkhy cover all four madhabs?
Yes. For fiqh questions, retrieval guarantees coverage of the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali schools, and the answer presents their positions side by side with the evidence each relies on. ShAIkhy does not privilege one school.
Can I use ShAIkhy in Arabic?
Yes — ShAIkhy is Arabic-first, with full English support. You can ask in either language, and sources are shown in their original Arabic with translations where available.
Is ShAIkhy open source?
Yes. The data pipeline, retrieval engine, and frontend are open source under the MIT license, so scholars and developers can audit exactly how answers are produced and where every citation comes from.
Who built ShAIkhy?
ShAIkhy is built by Omar Keshk, a mechatronics engineering student and self-taught developer, as a faith-driven project for the ummah — not a startup. See the About page for the full story.
More: About ShAIkhy · Methodology