Frequently Asked Questions
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What is ShAIkhy?
ShAIkhy (Arabic: شيخي, “my sheikh”) is a free 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, and no knowledge is put behind a paywall — every answer, source and grading is available to everyone alike. 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?
440,520 passages from 229 classical works: the complete Quran (all 6,236 ayat); 46,000+ hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, the four Sunan, Muwatta Malik and Musnad Ahmad, of which 37,000+ carry a scholarly grading; 29 tafsir works (Tabari, Ibn Kathir, Qurtubi, Razi, Sa'di and others); 80 fiqh works across all four madhabs including the commentaries; aqeedah, seerah and narrator biographies; and 56,711 entries from 9 classical Arabic lexicons. Sources are ranked by trust tier, with the Quran and the two Sahih collections surfaced first. The full list is on the methodology page.
How accurate is ShAIkhy?
On the IslamicFaithQA benchmark (QCRI), scored under the Fanar SimpleQA protocol with a GPT-4.1 judge on 500 questions per language, ShAIkhy answered 74.5% correctly in English and 73.9% in Arabic (July 2026, 95% confidence interval about ±3.8 points). The same language model with retrieval switched off scored 55.1%, so the retrieval, terminology and verification layers add about 19 points. Its weakest area is inheritance law. Methodology and per-category results are published on the methodology page.
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.
What does ShAIkhy mean, and how is it spelled?
ShAIkhy is the Arabic شيخي, “my sheikh” — the scholar you turn to with a question — with AI written into the middle of the word. It is pronounced “shay-khee”. People also write it Shaikhy, Sheikhy, Shaikhi, Sheikhi or Shaykhi; all of them mean this site, shaikhy.ai.
Is ShAIkhy an AI sheikh, or an Islamic ChatGPT?
In the sense people usually mean — an AI you can ask about Islam — yes. The difference from a general chatbot is that ShAIkhy is a retrieval system over classical sources: it answers only from passages it has actually found, cites each one, and shows the hadith grading, instead of generating from memory. It is a research tool, not a sheikh you follow. See “What is an AI sheikh?” for the full picture.
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: What is an AI sheikh? · About ShAIkhy · Methodology