The Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) hosted a conference entitled Digital Futures: The Digital Humanities in Islamic Studies on 28–29 May 2026, at the Aga KhanA title granted by the Shah of Persia to the then Ismaili Imam in 1818 and inherited by each of his successors to the Imamate. Centre, London. Convened by the Ismaili Special Collections Unit (ISCU), the two-day conference, which was also webcast online, brought together scholars, archivists, educators, and technologists from around the world to explore how digital methods are reshaping the study of Islamic traditions, and what this shift means for the institutions, communities, and knowledge systems involved.
Over the past decade, Digital Humanities methods, from large-scale digitisation and computational text analysis to network visualisation and generative artificial intelligence (AI), have moved to the centre of how knowledge is produced, curated, and shared. For Islamic Studies, these developments open new possibilities for engaging with manuscript collections, oral testimonies, multilingual archives, and the lived practices of contemporary Muslim communities. They also raise urgent questions about authority, mediation, ethics, and access. The conference set out to address these questions by bringing empirical research, methodological reflections, and institutional practices into sustained conversation.
Preserving and accessing Islamic heritage in the digital age
The conference opened on the morning of 28 May with a panel on archives, material culture, and preservation, chaired by Dr Alex Henley of IIS. Papers drew on the work of the Ismaili Special Collections Unit (ISCU) to examine how digital tools are transforming access to heritage collections. Naureen Ali explored how IIIF standards (International Image Interoperability Framework) can make manuscript collections more discoverable and widely shared. Mashal Gilani examined a virtual exhibition of photographic archives and what it reveals about digital heritage, religious authority, and communal belonging. Rizwan Karim drew on the ISCU’s Oral History Project to show how automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology can introduce linguistic bias, distorting multilingual testimonies and marginalising the very voices that archives aim to preserve.
A second panel, on AI, hermeneutics, and pedagogical innovation, extended these discussions to questions of scholarship and teaching. Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor examined the risk of methodological mimicry in AI-driven research, proposing a model of ‘generative inquiry’ that preserves epistemic rigour. Dr Najam Abbas explored how digital storytelling tools can engage younger audiences with Ismaili intellectual heritage, while Farah Naz of Aga Khan University considered how professional learning for humanities educators can keep pace with the shift from working with artefacts to designing with algorithms
Keynote address
The keynote address was delivered by Sarah Savant, Professor of History and Founding Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at Aga Khan University (AKU). Professor Savant leads the KITAB project (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book) and the European Research Council’s KITAB-Transform project. In her two-part lecture, she surveyed current and emerging work in the Digital Humanities with particular attention to Islamic Studies, presenting case studies that illustrate the new forms of knowledge these methods make possible. Much of the strongest DH scholarship, she argued, extends traditional humanistic methods to a scale no individual scholar could achieve alone. She also explored AI-assisted research, considering how scholars attuned to patterns across languages and cultures are well placed to tackle both familiar, and entirely new, questions.
Throughout, Professor Savant urged her audience to see digital methods not as a break with humanistic scholarship but as a continuation of it. ‘If you’ve searched a library catalogue, typed a phrase into Google, or looked something up in an online dictionary, you have already used digital methods,’ she observed. ‘So the question is not whether we use digital methods or even AI, but how – and how well we understand the ones we already rely on.’ It was a framing that set the tone for the conversation to follow, locating AI on a long spectrum of tools the humanities have quietly relied upon for decades.
If you’ve searched a library catalogue, typed a phrase into Google, or looked something up in an online dictionary, you have already used digital methods. So the question is not whether we use digital methods or even AI, but how — and how well we understand the ones we already rely on.
Digital platforms, identity, and ethical reasoning
The third panel of the first day, chaired by Dr Daryoush Poor, examined para-institutional publics and algorithmic authority, exploring how digital platforms are reshaping Ismaili religious life and collective memory outside formal institutional channels. Muhammad Ali Sohail examined AI-generated visual content on independently operated Ismaili Instagram pages, arguing that generative AI tools are creating a new infrastructure of digital identity in which non-institutional actors can produce visually authoritative content. Mubashir Artas explored how large language model (LLM) systems are emerging as moral mediators among young IsmailisAdherents of a branch of Shi’i Islam that considers Ismail, the eldest son of the Shi’i Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765), as his successor., while Professor Karim H. Karim of Carleton University situated these developments within broader traditions of Islamic ethics.
The second day opened with a panel on memory, community, and digital religion, chaired by Dr David Bennett of IIS. Nurain Lakhani examined how digital meme culture on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit, functions as a space where Ismaili communal norms are negotiated through humour. Mohsin Ali Baig explored ethical boundaries being constructed around Jalebi, an Ismaili dating application, through user-generated Reddit discussions. Muhammad Salim drew on virtual ethnography to show how digital platforms sustain the transnational identity of the Ismaili Student Network in the UK.
Curriculum, governance, and decolonial futures
The final panel, chaired by Dr Roy Wilson, turned to questions of governance, curriculum, and decolonial critique. Mehrullah Hussaini examined AI governance frameworks in higher education across Muslim-majority countries and their implications for Afghanistan, calling for policy approaches that integrate Islamic values with principles of academic integrity. Abidah Alidina proposed Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk), a Mi’kmaw (an Indigenous First Nations people in North America) pedagogical framework, as a transformative lens for reimagining digital Islamic Studies, foregrounding relational accountability and land-based awareness as alternatives to dominant technocratic models. Alnoor Nathani and Shameer Ali Prasla presented the IIS Digital Curriculum Platform, a multilingual educational gateway that is expanding global access to the Taʿlim curriculum of IIS for students, teachers, and community members around the world.
The Digital Futures conference affirmed the long longstanding commitment of IIS to the responsible exploration of Ismaili and broader Islamic intellectual traditions. By bringing together participants ranging from doctoral students to senior scholars, and from archivists to educators and technologists, it created a forum for sustained conversations about what the Digital Turn means for the field, its possibilities, its risks, and the communities whose heritage and knowledge are at stake.
