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This study addresses a contemporary intellectual question about the limits of authorship in the age of artificial intelligence: is a person to be regarded as an author if they have used smart tools or databases in producing their scholarly work?
The study offers a sharʿī (grounded in Islamic law) and philosophical foundation for the concepts of authorship and creativity. It shows that Islamic law (the Sharīʿa) regards as the author the one who expends intellectual effort and leaves their mark on the idea, the organisation and the analysis, even if they have used auxiliary means or sources.
The study holds that digital tools – such as Google, ChatGPT or Noor Library – are not independent authors. They are more like a library or a smart pen that the researcher uses to reach information more quickly. True creativity remains a human act, shown in the selection of ideas, the formulation of content, and the bearing of scholarly responsibility for it.
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Does evil have a beautiful face? A journey that uncovers the secret of trials and their purposes, inspired by the book *Beyond Evil* (*Mā Warāʾ al-Sharr*) by Shaykh Miṣbāḥ Yazdī. [CHECK: confirm the established English title of the book, if one exists]
The study also compares the method of the early scholars, who relied on transmitting from earlier books while introducing new arrangement and analysis, with that of the contemporary researcher who uses digital tools in research and writing. It concludes that the human being is the author so long as the thought is theirs, the intention is theirs, and the choice is theirs.
In closing, the study offers practical recommendations for combining scholarly integrity with pride in personal creativity. It affirms that modern tools do not abolish the human role; rather, they highlight human responsibility for directing them towards authentic and conscious knowledge production.
Introduction
Throughout its history, humanity has witnessed major transformations in the ways knowledge is acquired and produced: from the age of manuscripts and long journeys in pursuit of knowledge, to the age of printing and great libraries, and then to the digital revolution that has condensed thousands of volumes onto a small screen. With the arrival of artificial intelligence and advanced research tools such as Google, ChatGPT and the Noor Islamic Library, a fundamental question has emerged that reconsiders the meaning of authorship and creativity:
Is someone who uses these tools to gather information and compose research truly to be considered an author? Or have these tools become partners in authorship, or perhaps even the party chiefly responsible for producing the texts?
This question does not concern the technical side alone. It reaches into the roots of sharʿī and philosophical thought, because it bears on concepts such as intellectual property, scholarly effort, the right of attribution, and the nature of human creativity. What was once asked – “Who is the true scholar? Is it the transmitter of reports or the one who derives rulings?” – has returned today in a new form, in a world where human capacity is intertwined with the power of the machine.
This study aims to offer a sharʿī and philosophical grounding for this contemporary issue. It sets out the concept of the author in Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence) and analyses the philosophical dimension of the concepts of creativity and intellectual property. It then compares the early scholars' method of source-based authorship with today's researchers' use of digital tools and artificial intelligence. The study also discusses the criteria that distinguish the transmitter from the creator, and arrives at a balanced position that shows when a person is the true author despite using technological tools.
This study seeks not only to answer the question “Who wrote it?” but also to redefine the relationship between the human mind and the knowledge tool. It aims to establish the principle that creativity remains an authentically human act, however varied its means and however advanced its tools become.
The Sharʿī Grounding of the Concept of the “Author” in Islamic Fiqh
In Islamic fiqh, the concept of the author refers to the person who creates a scholarly or literary work and publishes it under their own name. Contemporary jurists have held that whoever publishes an original work and puts their name on it is its author in sharʿī terms, unless there is evidence to the contrary. Accordingly, works are attributed to their creators, who hold a moral right to have the work attributed to them. The International Islamic Fiqh Academy affirmed in its Resolution No. 43 (5/5) that the rights of authorship and invention are “protected by the Sharīʿa; their owners have the right to dispose of them, and it is not permissible to infringe upon them.” This means that the Sharīʿa recognises the author's moral and financial rights. It preserves the author's right to have the book attributed to them and protects their effort from appropriation or copying without their permission.
From the juristic perspective, scholars also hold that the author is entitled to a financial right in return for the effort and diligence spent in preparing the work. This financial right is compensation for what the author has done in gathering ideas, arranging them and drawing inferences from them. Jurists of the past drew attention to the cumulative nature of knowledge: every author benefits from the ideas and experiences of those who came before. Imam al-Qarāfī even said, “Acts of ijtihād (independent juristic reasoning) cannot be owned,” indicating that human knowledge belongs to the whole community. Nevertheless, the author retains their own right to their creativity and to the attribution of their work, in honour of their effort and as an incentive to scholarly production. In this way the Sharīʿa combines encouragement of the circulation of knowledge with protection of the rights of creators.
The Philosophical Grounding of the Concepts of “Creativity and Intellectual Property”
The concepts of intellectual creativity and intellectual property have undergone considerable philosophical development, especially with the emergence of the ideas of modernity and postmodernity. Traditionally, creativity was regarded as a uniquely human capacity that produces original works born of the mind. With the rise of intellectual property laws, those works of the mind came to be considered the private property of their creators, just like material property, in order to protect their rights and encourage innovation. The legal philosophy of intellectual property rested on the premise that the human being is the sole creator of ideas and creative works. In the modern age, however, and particularly since artificial intelligence entered the field of creative production, some philosophical assumptions have been shaken. AI has become capable of producing texts, paintings and musical pieces in a novel way, which has raised fundamental questions about originality and creativity. Traditional laws assumed that only the human being is the creator, whereas now “the human and the machine share the tools of creation and creativity.” This shift calls for philosophical reconsideration: what truly is a creative work? And can a non-human work possess creativity and originality in the true sense?
From the philosophical and ethical perspective, intellectual property issues have come strongly to the fore. Creativity is usually defined as generating the new out of the existing; that is, the creator blends earlier ideas and knowledge to produce something with a touch of innovation. Hence it was said of old: “There is nothing new under the sun” – except what is built upon what came before. Yet although all creativity depends on prior accumulation, individual distinction remains in the creator's mark and particular approach. From this standpoint, contemporary philosophers see the need to distinguish between human creativity supported by AI tools and purely artificial creativity, because the two differ in nature and value. Questions have also been raised about the fairness of training intelligent systems on earlier human works without compensating the original creators, and then attributing the new content they produce to the machine. Is this content independent and original, or merely a recombination of what humans previously created? Some analyses indicate that AI output is not fully independent but is based on “millions of protected human works.” Accordingly, modern philosophical thought seeks a framework that balances the rights of the human creator and their innovations on the one hand, and the machine's use of human knowledge on the other, so that the human being is not marginalised in the equation of creativity.
The Difference Between the Transmitter and the Creator: Is the Tool User a Transmitter or an Originator?
It is important to distinguish between transmission, as the mere reproduction of existing content, and creativity, as the invention of new content or a new formulation. The transmitter takes others' words or the information in sources as they are and passes them on without any substantive addition of their own. The creator, by contrast, applies their mind to the scholarly material: they present it in a new form, analyse it and comment on it, or arrange it in an innovative way. Using tools such as AI or search engines may present the user with two options: merely transmitting from the tool, or contributing creatively to the final product. For example, someone who copies a ready-made answer from ChatGPT without any modification or checking is acting merely as a transmitter. By contrast, someone who uses the outputs of these tools as a first draft, then refines it, reformulates it and enriches it with their own ideas and organisation, is in truth the author who originated the work.
In reality, most authors throughout the ages drew on earlier sources and ideas. They are nonetheless regarded as creators because of the effort, arrangement and additions they introduced. One contemporary researcher, defending the method of scholarly authorship, notes that an author draws their material from a broad range of references and cannot seek permission from the originator of every idea they transmit. In this they are like any researcher who draws light from the efforts of their predecessors: at times they quote, at times they paraphrase, and sometimes they add. This has been the practice of most authors and writers in every time and place. The essential difference, then, is that the pure transmitter offers a work devoid of their own mark, whereas the creator uses the available materials to make something that bears a measure of their intellectual distinctiveness. Even with smart tools, the human role remains decisive in moving from gathering and transmitting to innovation and distinctive formulation. When this role is fulfilled, the user is considered a true author and not a mere transmitter.
Criteria for Regarding the Human Being as the Author Despite Reliance on Tools
It is no secret that people today rely on a wide range of tools in research and writing, from traditional references to modern digital media. Nevertheless, there are clear criteria by which one can judge that a work is genuinely attributable to the user (the human being) rather than to the tool:
Idea and design: If the human being has the original idea or the overall conception of the content, and determined the structure and direction of the work, then they are the true author. The researcher's conception of their subject and of the lines of treatment gives the work an intellectual identity, regardless of the tools used to carry it out.
Selection and organisation: Creativity depends on the skilful selection of information and its arrangement. A person who gathers the scholarly material, chooses what is most suitable, and organises it into a coherent whole has performed the role of author, even if they used a tool to obtain that information. This effort of gathering the work's ideas, arranging them and drawing conclusions from them is the essence of the author's work.
Editing and formulation: One of the most important criteria is that the person formulates the content in their own language and style, or at least edits what the tool produces so that it fits their vision and corrects gaps or errors. The human touch in style and editing is a sign that the work came from a human mind and is not mere mechanical copying.
Addition and analysis: Whenever the user adds analyses, comments or new examples of their own, or connects areas of knowledge in an unfamiliar way, their creative contribution is evident. Even if the draft began as machine output, these additions make the final product a human work in its essence.
Responsibility and review: The true author bears responsibility for the correctness and accuracy of the content. If the person verifies the information, corrects errors the tool may have made, and checks the references, they have acted as an author who verifies their material. Conversely, blind reliance on the tool without review weakens the claim that the work belongs to the human being.
If a work meets these criteria – or most of them – we may say that the human being is its author, even if they used modern tools at some stages of preparation. In that case the tools are an auxiliary means and nothing more, while the creativity and direction come from the human mind and human effort. As has been said: the author is the one who expends intellectual effort in producing the work. Tools, however intelligent, remain mute machines without spirit unless a human mind sets them in motion and uses them to realise a specific vision.
Historical Examples: The Method of Authorship Among Muslim Scholars
The history of Islamic scholarship offers rich examples of reliance on earlier sources in authorship. Many works of the tradition were the product of gathering and arranging material from previous books. Even so, they were attributed to those who compiled them, and their merit was acknowledged. For example, Imam al-Ṭabarī (d. 310 AH), in his Tārīkh al-Rusul wa-l-Mulūk (History of the Messengers and Kings), collected historical reports from multiple sources, “transmitting the reports as they came from various sources”, without much commentary. Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597 AH) did likewise in his al-Muntaẓam, relying on verbatim transmission of texts from earlier historians. Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathīr (d. 774 AH), in al-Bidāya wa-l-Nihāya, likewise copied many reports from earlier accounts without change. These works were the encyclopaedias of their time, gathering scattered reports and accounts into an ordered whole, and their authors rendered a great service by preserving and arranging that knowledge for later generations.
Another prominent example is Imam Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911 AH), who wrote dozens of books on tafsīr (Qur'anic exegesis), hadith, history and other fields. In his Tārīkh al-Khulafāʾ (History of the Caliphs), he “took care to collect information from ancient sources, preserving their texts as they came, without adding his personal analysis except on a few points.” Although his analytical contribution was limited, his work of compiling and documenting was a creative act in itself. Al-Suyūṭī was careful to document every piece of information he cited by naming the source and the earlier author from whom he took it. This gave his book a high degree of credibility, so that it became “a reliable reference for anyone wishing to trace the origin of a piece of information.” There is no doubt that al-Suyūṭī is the author of this book. His arrangement of the material, his selection of reports and his presentation of them in a single work are innovative acts, even though they rely on an earlier body of tradition.
It is worth noting that the Shīʿī school also offered pioneering models of scholarly authorship that combine the use of earlier sources with creativity in organisation and analysis. Imam al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī (d. 460 AH), in his two books al-Tahdhīb and al-Istibṣār, was not a mere transmitter of reports. He rearranged them, organised them into chapters and derived rulings from them, following a precise method of reconciling reports and resolving contradictions between them. As a result, his works became a foundation of Imāmī fiqh for many centuries. Likewise, al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq (d. 381 AH), in his book Man Lā Yaḥḍuruhu al-Faqīh, compiled reports from multiple sources. He presented them in a simplified, annotated juristic style suited to people's daily needs, and so the scholars regarded him as a creative author, not a transmitter.
In later centuries, al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 726 AH) was one of the foremost practitioners of analytical, comparative authorship. In books such as Tadhkirat al-Fuqahāʾ and Muntahā al-Maṭlab, he reviewed the views of earlier Sunni and Shīʿī jurists, then analysed them and identified the stronger view on the basis of his own evidence. In doing so he established a new method of comparative ijtihād. Likewise, al-Shahīd al-Awwal (the First Martyr, d. 786 AH) in al-Lumʿa al-Dimashqiyya and al-Shahīd al-Thānī (the Second Martyr, d. 965 AH) in al-Rawḍa al-Bahiyya stood out as methodical authors who restructured juristic knowledge in a simplified, teaching-oriented style, although they relied on the books of their predecessors.
In the modern era, we may mention Imam Sayyid al-Khomeini (quddisa sirruh – may his soul be sanctified) in Taḥrīr al-Wasīla and al-Ijtihād wa-l-Taqlīd, and Sayyid Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr (quddisa sirruh) in al-Usus al-Manṭiqiyya li-l-Istiqrāʾ (The Logical Foundations of Induction) and Iqtiṣādunā (Our Economics). Both drew on the heritage of the jurists and philosophers before them, yet offered renewing readings that rebuilt concepts in contemporary language. All this confirms that reliance on earlier scholarly material does not diminish authorship, so long as the work bears a new intellectual mark, and its organisation and additions spring from the author's own mind and vision.
These examples show that the Muslim scholars of the past did not start from nothing but built upon those before them. They were often compilers, commentators and documenters more than originators of entirely new texts. Nevertheless, history recognised them as authors. No one said of al-Ṭabarī or Ibn al-Jawzī that they were mere transmitters without merit. They were regarded as outstanding compilers because they produced books with their own character and message, despite heavy reliance on earlier sources. Indeed, the method of the “transmitters” (al-naqala) was itself a recognised method of authorship among Muslims. Its aim was to preserve and collect knowledge, a task that requires effort and insight in selection and documentation. Consequently, those works were attributed to those who compiled and composed them, not to the original sources alone. This is exactly what we see today: whoever gathers scholarly material from several digital or printed sources and then presents it in a new form is, by custom and by scholarly standards, the owner of the work. The condition of scholarly integrity is to attribute statements to those who made them and not to plagiarise others' efforts. Many authors of the tradition observed this condition by citing chains of transmission (isnād) and references frequently, as al-Suyūṭī and others did.
Smart Tools: Are They More Like a Muṣḥaf, a Library, or a Writer?
Comparing smart tools such as the ChatGPT platform or the Google search engine to the muṣḥaf, the library or the writer is an attempt to understand their nature and their role in the process of authorship:
The muṣḥaf (the fixed sacred text): The noble muṣḥaf (the written copy of the Qur'an) is a vessel containing the fixed text of divine revelation. One benefits from it by transmitting and citing its verses verbatim, without any alteration or new generation on the user's part. From this angle, AI does not resemble the muṣḥaf. It does not present predetermined texts that must be followed verbatim; it produces variable outputs. The resemblance may lie in the fact that both are sources of information: just as a researcher turns to the Holy Qur'an to derive a ruling or a meaning, another turns to a vast knowledge base (trained into an AI model) to obtain information or a formulation. Nevertheless, the difference remains fundamental: the muṣḥaf is a fixed, revealed text, whereas the content of the smart tool is machine-generated text. That text may be right or wrong and is not an authority that can be trusted to the same degree.
The library (a repository of knowledge and references): Modern research tools resemble the library to a great extent. The Google search engine, for example, is a gateway to a vast quantity of stored books, articles and information (whether the Noor Islamic Library or others). Similarly, a model such as ChatGPT can be regarded as an implicit library trained on millions of pages of text. When we ask it, it calls up stored knowledge in a simplified form, much as a librarian summarises a set of references. From this standpoint, these tools are more like the library, or the librarian who quickly provides the researcher with information. It should be noted, however, that the traditional library offers texts with documented sources that the researcher can verify directly. ChatGPT, by contrast, offers a blend of information in a newly composed form and may not always cite its sources. Nevertheless, the role of these tools remains in essence that of a helper and provider of information, just like the library, and they have no will or authorial intent of their own. They do not adopt opinions or defend an idea of their own accord; they reflect what they have learned from what people have written before.
The writer (the creative self that produces the text): The human writer is distinguished by intentionality, will and awareness in the act of writing. They choose their meanings and words for a particular purpose and pour their experience and personality into what they write. Does the smart tool rise to this level, so that it can be counted a writer? It apparently does not. It is true that AI generates new texts that had not been written verbatim before, but these texts are the product of a statistical algorithm that has neither self nor intention. The machine is not aware of the meanings of what it says, nor does it of itself aim to persuade or delight. It produces linguistic combinations based on patterns learned from human writing. It is therefore a mistake to treat it as an authorial person. It lacks the inner, felt creativity and the value-laden choice of the human writer. One may say that the smart tool is most like a “pen” or a “printing press” equipped with a vast library: a tool that produces text, but on the basis of human inputs and instructions and of what it has been programmed to do. Attributing the final work to it is therefore like attributing the writing to the pen, and that does not hold. Artificial intelligence, despite the appearance of the “writing” it performs, holds no moral rights in the texts it produces and bears no responsibility for them; it cannot be held accountable for plagiarism or scholarly error. All this confirms that these tools are closer to a technical intermediary than to a creative writer in the true sense. As some researchers have asked: “Can the creative output of these models be considered independent if it is based on millions of human works?” Their implicit answer is that generated content merely remixes and regurgitates human creativity and has no originality of its own apart from it.
In sum, smart tools are advanced auxiliary sources. They combine the characteristics of the library (abundance of information) with some features of the writer (the capacity to formulate text), but they are not independent authors. It remains the human mind that benefits from them, uses them and controls their results. They are therefore more like the intellectual servant of the true author.
A Word on the Claim: “You Didn't Write It – ChatGPT Did”
We have entered a new era of human history: the era of artificial intelligence. It is not a recreational tool or a passing technology but a civilisational transformation that is reshaping the relationship between the human being and knowledge, and between thought and production. The emergence of printing in the fifteenth century was not the end of scholars and calligraphers but the beginning of an unprecedented intellectual revolution. In the same way, the emergence of artificial intelligence is not the end of authorship but the beginning of a new stage of authorship, blended with the collective intelligence of humankind.
To say that someone who uses AI tools is not a writer is like reproaching the ancients for using paper instead of memorisation, or for relying on libraries and sources. No one said that a scholar who researched in hundreds of books “did not write” because the books existed before him. Rather, it was said that he was the one who searched, selected, arranged, deduced and formulated. Likewise, whoever uses tools such as ChatGPT, Google or Noor Library today is following the same path, only with greater speed and efficiency.
The difference between the human and the machine lies not in the ability to generate texts, but in intention, awareness, purpose and choice. The machine produces, but it does not know why it produced. The human being, by contrast, selects, compares, corrects and directs. The essence of creativity lies not in the writing itself but in the awareness that guides the writing. When a person uses AI tools to achieve their intellectual aims, they are not surrendering to the machine. They are harnessing it to serve their mind and their mission.
Those who reject these tools on the pretext of “preserving the originality of authorship” forget that originality lies not in the means but in the spirit that inhabits the text. A jurist today uses fiqh databases without losing the status of mujtahid (a scholar qualified to exercise ijtihād), and an engineer uses a computer without anyone saying that the computer did the designing. In the same way, the writer who uses artificial intelligence does not lose their humanity; they expand it to encompass a world of possibilities that was not available before.
We stand on the threshold of a new age in which the tools of writing are changing, just as the tools of agriculture, industry and trade have changed. Whoever insists on resisting this transformation in the name of “loyalty to the past” risks falling behind the caravan, for the caravans of civilisation do not wait for the hesitant. Printing did not close the door of ijtihād; it threw it wide open. Artificial intelligence will likewise open a wider door to knowledge – provided that we use it well rather than fear it.
The danger is not that the machine writes, but that the human being stops thinking. The machine without a thinking human is nothing but blind energy, while the human without new tools is thought shackled to the past. Our duty today is to carry the light of reason, to lead this transformation with confidence, and to keep the equation right: the machine produces, but the human creates; the machine assists, but the human directs.
Whoever rejects this revolution rejects history itself. Whoever engages with it with a mature mind and faith in values is the one who will shape the future. To such people we say: we are not the ones who write with the machine; rather, we are the ones who write with it, through it and for the sake of humanity [CHECK: the first clause literally contradicts the second; the intended sense may be “we are not written by the machine”]. Every age has its tools, and whoever falls behind the tools of their age writes with the ink of the past in the time of the future.
Conclusion and Practical Recommendations
Suppose someone who used artificial intelligence or other tools to prepare their research or article is asked: “Did you write this?” They should answer clearly, according to the reality of their role in its authorship. In light of the foregoing, the default position is that the user owns the work, so long as they performed the essential role in composing and producing it. If they used ChatGPT or Google to obtain some information or suggestions and then sifted, refined, organised and formulated it in their own style, they may say with full confidence: “Yes, I am the author” of this work. The work is published under their name and attributed to them by custom, and they are the one who gathered its material, brought its parts together and added their own thought and revisions. A scholar of old who went through the major reference works, gathered his material from them and then recorded it with his own pen is regarded as the author of his book, not the libraries he drew on. In the same way, the contemporary researcher who gathers material via the internet and uses auxiliary editing software is the author, so long as the product bears their mark and effort.
On the other hand, transparency is required to the extent needed. If a person's reliance on the tool is so great that the machine output makes up most of the work, with only minor changes, then integrity requires them to make this clear when asked. If, however, the tool merely helped them access information or speed up certain tasks, there is nothing wrong in affirming that they wrote and authored the work. They may add, if necessary or if asked for details, that they used modern research tools as part of their method (which is no different from using references and books, as researchers customarily do). Technology has become part of the process of research and writing, but the final decision and the last word belong to the human mind. Consequently, the use of a tool does not negate the attribution of the work to its owner, just as no one says that a person who used a computer to write their book did not write it themselves.
Practical recommendations: An author who uses these tools should adhere to the ethics of research and writing. They should review what the tool provides and not accept every piece of information without scrutiny. They should quote honestly from the real sources the tool relied on, if they know them. And they should not hesitate to mention, if asked, that they used modern technologies, together with a statement that the final product is the fruit of their own thought and personal effort. In this way they can combine pride in their work as its author with acknowledgement of the tools' contribution as auxiliary means and nothing more. Ultimately, our judgement of written works remains based on their content and originality, regardless of the tools used to compose them. If a person achieves originality in the idea, the composition or the treatment, they are without doubt the creative author, and the tool is only one of the pens they harnessed in producing this creative work. The proper answer to the question “Did you write it?” is therefore: “I wrote it with my mind and my effort, using modern tools where they serve my research.” This answer combines truthfulness and fairness, and highlights the human being as the one owed primary credit for the authorship, however varied the aids of the age may be.
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