The world forgot why we’re here. We’ve gotten lost in our own desires and goals. In the entertainment value of the next swipe and dopamine hit from ordering that next Uber Eats. We as humans are here for a reason. The Quran was sent as a reminder to the whole world. It was sent to remind us that we’re here to worship God. We’re here to do what he commanded and we were engineered for. A lot of humanity has lost that understanding or not even begun to understand. While the Quran is 1400 years old, technology has only reached a place now that we can access it in any language instantly. Yet there still seems to be something holding us back from fully embracing it. The Quran was given to an Arab nation in the Arabic language and with that so much still projects the idea that its only for those of Arab descent. This is not the case. The Quran is for everyone. Islam is for everyone.
Reminder is a new project I’m working on to improve the accessibility to the Quran and related works in a modern world. A technology driven world. This means primarily focus on a developer audience to start. Making it programmatically accessible and also querable via an LLM (large language model). So far I’m working with the English translation of the Quran, Hadiths and names of God. Building an index with embeddings generated via OpenAI’s API we can now query the Quran and Hadiths in real time with natural language questions and get accurate responses using GPT 4o mini. This is a very powerful tool that should open the doors of Islam and a path to Allah for those who have struggled or are intimidated by the other means of asking the questions.
What is my personal motivation here? I myself have questions and while I continue to read the Quran and Sunnah on a daily basis, its enormous amount of text to ingest and reason about. So being able to ask the questions to an LLM is a way of getting to the source or specific texts I’m interested at that. I also feel like its my duty as a muslim now to help others find the path to Allah the way I did. One straight read of the Quran in English can be life changing, but after that we all have questions. While one can seek out the help or look internally we should also leverages the tools we have to improve this experience.
God willing this is something that will be beneficial for everyone.