Co-Designing Islamic AI Ethics: Insights from the UK Muslim Community

• doi:10.1145/3772318.3790413

Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

AI governance frameworks are predominantly shaped by Western, secular values, which risks excluding the perspectives of 1.9 billion Muslims whose ethical reasoning is grounded in Islamic principles. To address this gap, we conducted co-design workshops with 12 Muslim women, to identify Islamic ethical values for AI systems and examine how these compare to the UK AI White Paper. Our analysis revealed four themes that complement and challenge assumptions in secular AI governance, (1) Honesty, Transparency, and Trustworthiness; (2) Knowledge, Responsibility, and Divine Accountability; (3) Justice, Power, and Equity; and (4) Unity, Inclusivity, and Diversity. Our findings present Islamic ethical AI processes, including Hadith authentication for verification, collective consultation (shūrā), and wealth distribution (zakat) for restorative and re-distributive justice. This paper contributes to calls for decolonial AI governance and offers the HCI community an Islamic understanding of AI ethics to broaden debates beyond Western paradigms.