Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, was signed on May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, an encyclical that addressed the conditions of the working class at a transformational moment in the nature of technology. Magnifica Humanitas is one of the most significant moral interventions of our time and likewise comes at a time of rapid technological change. Running to over 42,000 words, this extraordinary document situates Artificial Intelligence (AI) not only as a technical challenge but also as a civilizational predicament, grappling with deep questions of human dignity, political power, and the prospects for peace.
In my earlier engagements with the late Pope Francis’s encyclicals, Evangelii Gaudium (2014), Laudato Si’ (2015) and Fratelli Tutti (2020), I argued that these landmark documents created constructive platforms for Muslim leaders to enter into renewed dialogue with Catholics on the critical moral challenges of our time. Magnifica Humanitas amplifies that invitation. Like Pope Francis before him, Pope Leo XIV has articulated a theological vision that resonates profoundly with the ethical imperatives found at the heart of Islam. At the same time, the pope poses a pointed challenge to the classical Islamic ethical tradition: his declaration that just war theory is now outdated calls on Muslims to undertake a long-deferred renewal of the classical jurisprudence of armed struggle (fiqh al-jihad) in light of the indiscriminate destructiveness of modern warfare, a challenge Muslim scholars are well positioned to engage with thoughtfully. In what follows, I highlight four dimensions of the document’s significance for Muslims, while also identifying one important limitation and one challenge that invite honest and critical engagement.
The Culture of Power
At the moral and theological heart of Magnifica Humanitas is what Pope Leo XIV calls the “culture of power,” a global condition in which, as he writes, “peace no longer appears as a responsibility to be taken on, but as a fragile interval between conflicts” (para. 189), and in which the military-industrial complex profits from the perpetuation of violence. This diagnosis strikes me as profoundly resonant with the Qur’anic concept of fasad fi al-ard, or the idea that there exist ongoing corruption and disorder upon the earth. The Qur’an consistently identifies this corruption as the gravest threat to human flourishing and divine order (Qur’an 28:77).
The Arabic term fasad (lit. corruption, depravity, etc.) encompasses not merely individual wrongdoing but the systematic destruction of the conditions necessary for justice and dignity, precisely what Pope Leo XIV describes as the “culture of power.” The Qur’an’s view on cultures that misinterpret their own dominance for permanence is sobering: “How many powerful empires mightier than them did We bring to ruin, civilizations stronger than they who spread their power across the earth, imposing their will upon its peoples. Yet when the reckoning came, was there any escape?” (Qur’an 50:36).
Magnifica Humanitas consistently posits that technological innovation must serve the common good rather than the interests of powerful political and economic actors. From an Islamic perspective, this ethical imperative is deeply rooted in the Qur’anic principle of qist (justice), which occupies a foundational place in the tradition’s moral theology. The Qur’an not only commands believers to stand firmly for justice (Qur’an 4:135) but explicitly warns against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a privileged few: “[Wealth] should not circulate only among the rich among you” (Qur’an 59:7). Together, these Qur’anic teachings affirm that technological and economic innovation should advance the common good rather than reinforce existing structures of privilege and inequality.
From the perspective of maqasid al-shariʿah, or the higher objectives of Islamic law, an AI system cannot be regarded as ethically legitimate if it systematically undermines human dignity, exacerbates economic exclusion, or concentrates power in ways that harm the vulnerable.
This ethical vision is further embodied in the Islamic principle of maslahah (public welfare), which demands that technological development serve the well-being of society as a whole, rather than the interests of a privileged minority. Accordingly, the ethical legitimacy of AI must be assessed by the extent to which it promotes the public good: expands access to things like education, healthcare, and economic opportunity; protects workers and vulnerable communities from harm; and contributes to social justice more broadly.
This, in turn, requires Muslim engagement with AI to move beyond questions of mere permissibility (halal or haram) toward the broader and more pressing questions of justice. The central ethical challenge is not simply whether Muslims may use AI, but whether it is being developed, deployed, and governed in ways that uphold human dignity, reduce inequality, and promote the common good.
Here, however, I must offer a critical observation. In a policy paper published by the TRT World Research Centre on June 18, 2026, Tarek Cherkaoui rightly draws attention to a significant omission in Pope Leo’s 2026 encyclical: its failure to adequately address the active deployment of AI in the algorithmic massacres Israel has perpetrated in Gaza since October 2023, including the Israeli Defense Force’s use of Gospel and Lavender AI targeting systems. The United States’ AI targeting system, Project Maven has been used in Iran and might have played a role in the targeting of an elementary school which left 156 civilians, including 120 children, dead.
These systems did not emerge from the abstract “culture of power” concept that the Pope’s encyclical diagnoses as a civilizational pathology, rather these systems are the most concrete and lethal manifestation of this concept. An encyclical that calls for the “disarming of AI” cannot remain silent on AI-enabled warfare that is visibly and actively causing mass civilian casualties.
For conscientious readers, people of faith, and responsible global citizens who have witnessed these systems operate in real time against predominantly Muslim populations, this silence is not merely a troubling omission or scholarly lacuna. It is itself a moral wound, one that risks functioning as a form of epistemic violence by rendering invisible the most devastating contemporary manifestations of AI.
Beyond Just War: The Challenge to Fiqh al-Jihad
Perhaps the most courageous dimension of Magnifica Humanitas is its declaration that just war theory is “now outdated” and that “to fight in the name of religion means attacking religion itself” (para. 220–25). Pope Francis had already moved in this direction in Fratelli Tutti, and, as I noted in my response to that encyclical, this challenge is equally, and perhaps even more acutely, relevant to the Islamic tradition. The classical fiqh al-jihad (jurisprudence of armed struggle), originally forged in response to the imperial politics and geopolitical realities of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire, is urgently in need of renewal in light of the indiscriminate destructiveness of contemporary warfare. The Islamic tradition itself possesses the theological and ethical resources for such a renewal. The Qur’an’s moral calculus on the sanctity of life could not be more unambiguous: “Whoever kills a soul without just cause, it is as if he has killed all of humanity. And whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity” (Qur’an 5:32).
This Qur’anic verse establishes a moral standard of such precision that it renders the culture of algorithmic warfare, in which civilian casualties are mathematically embedded into AI-enabled targeting systems, not merely impermissible, but a profound desecration of the sanctity, reverence, and divine trust invested in human life. Yet only a handful of Muslim scholars, among them Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, Shaykh Jawdat Saʿid, Chaiwat Satha-Anand, and Rabia Terri Harris, have taken the task of developing an Islamic theology of nonviolence grounded in these Qur’anic imperatives seriously. Their pioneering contributions deserve far greater engagement from mainstream Muslim scholars than they have thus far received.
Artificial Intelligence, the Qalb, and the Limits of Muslim Engagement
Pope Leo insists in Magnifica Humanitas that AI must serve humanity as a whole, rather than the powerful few. This argument is grounded in the conviction that human dignity is irreducible and cannot be delegated to algorithms (para. 100–20). This theological anthropology of human dignity resonates deeply with the Qur’anic proclamation: “We have indeed honored all the children of Adam” (Qur’an 17:70.) This honor, or karama al-insan, is not conditional upon utility nor dependent on productivity. Rather, it is grounded in the divine act of creation itself; every human is fashioned by God and breathed into with the divine spirit. As the Qur’an proclaims, “I have fashioned the human being and breathed of My spirit into him” (Qur’an 15:29). Any technology that threatens to bypasses this dignity, including AI systems that reduce human beings to data points in a targeting algorithm, stands in fundamental contradiction with the Islamic understanding of the human person.
Building on this theological anthropology, one of the most novel and significant contributions to an Islamic theology of artificial intelligence is Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour’s 2025 article in the journal Religions, “Artificial Intelligence and the Islamic Theology of Technology: From ‘Means’ to ‘Meanings’ and from ‘Minds’ to ‘Hearts.’” Drawing on al-Ghazali’s Ihya’ ʿUlum al-Din, Abdelnour argues that Muslim engagement with AI has thus far focused predominantly on its cognitive and jurisprudential implications while neglecting the qalb, or the heart, which Islamic thought understands as the cognitive, moral, and spiritual center of the human person. As the Qur’an observes, “They have hearts with which they do not understand” (Qur’an 7:179). While AI may simulate certain intellectual functions, it is ontologically incapable of genuine moral agency because it lacks a qalb.
The Islamic jurisprudential tradition offers equally rich resources for AI governance. The notion of maqasid al-shari’ah, which includes approaches for protecting life, intellect, religion, lineage, and property, provides a structured framework for evaluating the implications of AI for human flourishing. The principle of sadd al-dhara’i’ (blocking the means to harm) likewise provides an Islamic warrant for exactly the kind of proactive, precautionary AI regulation Pope Leo’s encyclical demands.
Nevertheless, I reiterate the frank assessment I offered in my response to Fratelli Tutti: contemporary Muslim engagement with warfare remains largely jurisprudential and technically focused. What remains almost entirely absent is the kind of prophetic, justice-centered, and interreligious engagement that situates and connects the AI question within the broader structures of power, warfare, and the Global South’s subordination to Western technological dominance. As Hesham Gaafar has observed, foundational AI models, the majority of which are trained using Western secular datasets, systematically exclude and marginalize Islamic perspectives and have generated outputs that associate Muslim identities with terrorism in a significant proportion of cases. This is not merely a technical deficiency. It is a manifestation of fasad fi al-ard (corruption on earth) that both the Qur’an and Magnifica Humanitas identify and diagnose as a profound moral crisis. Thus, this problem demands a prophetic and visionary response, not merely a jurisprudential one.
The Islamic Vision of Justpeace
Against the culture of power, Pope Leo XIV proposes a “civilization of love,” a world community built on the principles of justice, dialogue, and solidarity with the victims of history (245–65). This vision aligns deeply with what peace scholars call justpeace, a condition encompassing not merely the absence of armed conflict but the positive presence of justice, dignity, and the equitable distribution of the earth’s resources. The concept of qist, or justice as a cosmic principle, is not merely a procedural norm but the very standard by which God measures human civilizations (see Qur’an 4:135).
Similarly, the concept of rahmah, or compassion, is not a private virtue but a civilizational mandate: “We have not sent you, (O Muhammad), except as a source of compassion to all the worlds” (Qur’an 21:107). Finally, the concept of khalifah, or stewardship of the earth on behalf of its Creator, provides a theological foundation for responsible governance of technology that purely secular AI ethics frameworks cannot supply (Qur’an 6:165).
At the Sant’Egidio conference “Daring Peace” in Rome in October 2025, Grand Imam Dr. Ahmad Al-Tayyeb of Al-Azhar Islamic University, and the Vatican announced their plans to complete a joint charter on the ethics of AI, which is a welcome and significant step. Hopefully, this charter will not remain only a document of institutional partnership between religious hierarchies, but will become a living moral conversation that reaches scholars, communities, and people most affected by AI’s disruptive power: the working class, the displaced, the algorithmically profiled, and the victims of AI-enabled warfare.
One Limitation and One Challenge
In keeping with the spirit of honest dialogue that has characterized my previous engagements with Pope Francis’s encyclicals, I wish to identify one critical limitation of Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas that Muslim scholars are particularly well-positioned to address. I then want to raise a concern for Muslim scholars and institutions that the encyclical presses us as Muslims scholars and institutions to confront.
The limitation first. As I have noted, the encyclical’s silence on AI-enabled military targeting systems is a significant moral lacuna. It is one thing to warn, as the document does, of the abstract and future dangers of artificial intelligence to human dignity; it is another to name the systems already deployed to select, track, and destroy human targets, systems operative in our own time and, not infrequently, trained upon the bodies of Muslim populations. The principle of sadd al-dhara’i’ (blocking the means to harm), demands that any serious ethical engagement with AI must address its most lethal current applications, not merely its potential future dangers. To pass over automated killing in silence while cautioning against speculative harms is to invert the very order of moral urgency that this principle requires. Pope Leo XIV’s demonstrated courage in opposing unjust wars in his public statements makes this omission all the more striking, for it suggests the encyclical possesses the moral vocabulary to speak plainly here and has, for reasons unstated, declined to do so.
The second challenge I must direct most pointedly at those Muslim scholars and institutions whose posture toward the state is one of patronage, apprehension, or pious obeisance, those, in short, whose orientation might be described as fundamentally statist. Magnifica Humanitas asks a probing question aimed at such institutions and scholars: Whose interests does our silence serve? As Hesham Gaafar rightly observes, Sunni Islam possesses no single central authority equivalent to the papal magisterium. But that structural diversity need not beget moral silence. The question before these scholars and institutions is whether, in the face of the algorithmic injustices and the culture of power that Magnifica Humanitas so prophetically names, we can summon the moral courage to raise our voices.
Conclusion
Notwithstanding the critical observations I have raised, Magnifica Humanitas is a phenomenal document. It is visionary and prophetic in its diagnosis, courageous in its prescriptions, and urgent in its timing. Released on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, and in the season of Hajj, when millions of Muslims gathered on the sacred plains of `Arafah on June 5, 2026, Magnifica Humanitas arrived as a reminder that the moral challenges of our time do not adhere to religious boundaries, and that the response to those challenges requires the best wisdom of every tradition.
For Muslims, Magnifica Humanitas is both a challenge and an invitation. The challenge is to move beyond the comfort of internal theological debate and institutional self-preservation, and to bring the rich ethical resources of the Islamic tradition, its theology of karama al-insan, its jurisprudence of maslaha and maqasid, its qalb-centered epistemology, its prophetic ethic of speaking truth to power, and its Qur’anic vision of justpeace, into genuine, sustained, and critical dialogue with interreligious allies.
In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis inaugurated a constructive platform for a dialogue of civilization. Through Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV has extended and deepened that platform, not merely through words but through actions: opposing unjust wars, challenging the global arms trade, exposing the culture of power, and calling humanity to build a civilization of love. It is my sincere hope that Muslim scholars, institutions, and leaders will respond with a similar determination, moral clarity, and prophetic courage that this historic moment demands.
The task before humanity is not merely to regulate AI but to ensure that it serves justice rather than domination, solidarity rather than exclusion, and human flourishing rather than profit. Expressed in Islamic terms, this requires a global commitment to qist (justice), rahmah (compassion), karamah (human dignity), and khilafah (stewardship). AI must become a tool for reducing inequality, empowering the vulnerable, and advancing the common good, otherwise it risks becoming yet another instrument through which the powerful consolidate their power at the expense of the weak. The time has come for Muslims, Catholics, and all people of conscience to work together in shaping an ethical future worthy of our shared humanity. The civilization of love and justice is not a utopian dream; it is a moral and spiritual imperative. The time to build it, together, in fidelity, is now.
