Minds and Machines (2019) 29:341–347

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-019-09499-2

REPLY

Delegating Religious Practices to Autonomous Machines,

A Reply to “Prayer‑Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter:
A Call for a Wider Research Agenda”

Yaqub Chaudhary1

Published online: 9 April 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

1 Introduction

Öhman et al. (2019) have drawn attention to the phenomenon of Islamic Prayer-Bots
and religious worship on Twitter and social media platforms, which, they argue, has
gone unnoticed by the research community, despite the significant scale of the activ-
ity. In this case, prayers and supplications are automatically posted to the accounts
of real people by third party services through the accounts of real users who “crea-
tively automate a facet of their online activity.”
The authors argue that this type of activity has been outside the scope of the
prevailing discourse on social media bots, which tends to focus on fully automated
accounts, whereas the activity identified in the study is an interpolation of human
and bot activity through single accounts. Previous work has described accounts
that are operated by both bots and humans as “cyborg” accounts, which were first
identified on Twitter by Chu et al. (2010, 2012) . However, such hybrid accounts in
general appear to have fallen out of sight of earlier classification schemes of social
media bots, partly due to the difficulty of detecting such accounts (Alarifi et  al.
2016, p. 342). Furthermore, there has been a binary distinction between human and
bot accounts, and much of the work to date on social media automation has predom-
inantly focussed on malicious uses, which has subsumed what might be conceived
of as “good” or “beneficial” bots under the categories of neutral or benign (Ferrara
et al. 2016; Stieglitz et al. 2017, p. 7).
There has been considerable interest in the phenomenon of computational propa-
ganda in recent years, which has been defined as “the assemblage of social media
platforms, autonomous agents and big data tasked with the manipulation of public
opinion” (Woolley and Howard 2016). Hence, we may ask whether the analogous
concept of “computational prayer”, which we may define as, “The assemblage of
social media platforms, autonomous agents and religious data, derived from sacred

* Yaqub Chaudhary
yc@cambridgemuslimcollege.ac.uk
1
Cambridge Muslim College, Cambridge, UK

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Y. Chaudhary

texts, tasked with prayer and worship for human and worldly flourishing,” makes
any sense from an Islamic perspective.

2 Islamic or Muslim Prayer Apps

According to the analysis of Öhman et al. (2019), Islamic Prayer Apps, which auto-
matically post prayers on social media feeds, represent, “one of the largest examples
to date of Twitter automation being deployed organically in a creative and culturally
significant way.”
A wide range of apps now exists to assist with rituals such as establishing prayer
times and directions, acting as a handbook for invocations and situational supplica-
tions, or for reading sacred texts. In earlier work, Rachel Wagner identified at least
six different types of religious smartphone apps that existed as of September 2010,
namely, prayer apps that enable users to pray by “typing and sending prayers”, ritual
apps that provide guidance on the performance of religious acts, and apps for sacred
texts, religious social media, self-expression, and meditation. Regarding prayer
apps, Wagner asks why users might feel compelled to issue prayers in cyberspace,
rather than just closing their eyes and making a prayer, and she highlights that apps
such as these raise the question of, “Who or what we encounter when we use such
apps, whether it is other users, God, or perhaps just the program itself” (Wagner
2012). Elsewhere, she questions whether an “authentic encounter with God (or other
believers) has taken place” or whether such prayers merely amount to solo media
performances (Campbell 2013, p. 200).
For Wagner, the challenges posed by these apps relate to the transformation of
religious practices when they are mediated by digital technologies, the “authentic-
ity” of these new practices and how the design of apps may shape religious com-
munities by bringing them into conformity with the limited modes of expression
that the apps allow (Campbell 2013, pp. 199–201). The phenomenon highlighted
by Öhman and colleagues raises several questions related to the nature of Islamic
expressions of religion online and how these developments seem to be shaping con-
ceptions of Islamic forms of prayer for certain Muslim communities.

3 Prayer

There are several words for different forms of prayer in Arabic, such as salāh
(prayer), duʿā’ (supplication) and dhikr (invocation). Salāh is most often applied
to signify the divinely appointed prayer, however it may also refer to more general
forms of prayer or supplication. Duʿā’ is a supplicatory prayer that may be made
with the same wording found in the Qur’an or hadith, or may be personalised in
one’s own words. A hadith describes duʿā’ as, “The essence of worship,”  (Sunan
al-Tirmidhī 3371) since it involves an acknowledgement of God’s power over all
things. Hence, making a prayer is an act of worship that is rewarded and benefits
one’s afterlife and present life, directly or indirectly, perceptibly or imperceptibly.

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The most general word for prayer is dhikr, which refers to any form of invocation
or remembrance of God, which may be said silently or loudly, by the tongue or one’s
inner self, in a group or in isolation, and with or without melody. Engaging in dhikr
is a frequent Qur’anic injunction and numerous verses refer to the Qur’an itself as
“The Remembrance” (15:9, 16:44).
Invocations may be derived from phrases in the Qur’an and hadith or authored
by saintly figures, such as the numerous litanies by Sufi masters written throughout
Islamic history, which incorporate combinations of verses, invocations, supplica-
tions and different levels of spiritual poetry that carry instructions and meanings to
aid seekers stage by stage in their spiritual journey to God.
Dhikr and duʿā’ are distinguished from the regular five daily prayers (salāh) by
being purely voluntary, however, they are both practices that a Muslim must engage
with at some stage over the course of their lives.
According to Islamic teachings, all acts of prayer and worship include outward
aspects, which are the instructions and rulings given in the Sharia, as well as inward
aspects that relate to issues such as intention, presence before God, depth of concen-
tration and contemplation. Potentially every good act can be consecrated as an act
of worship by rooting it in an intention that is directed to God and by preceding the
action with the phrase, “In the name of God.”

4 Intention and Comprehension

Qur’an (24:41) mentions that “Every creature knows its forms of prayer and praise,”
and elsewhere (13:13, 16:48) the Qur’an mentions that all animate and inanimate
creatures and things are in a state of submission to God in a way related to their own
natures, that is, at some metaphysical level of abstraction. Humans are differentiated
from the rest of creation since, according to Islamic theology, humans possess free
will over which to exercise intellectual judgement in the direction of their intentions
and actions. In addition, humans are differentiated in their capacity to comprehend
signs that point to God in verses (āyāt, lit. signs) of sacred texts and in the world.
The Prophet Muhammad’s ‫ ﷺ‬companion, Ali, is recorded to have said, “There
is no good in an act of worship without comprehension, nor in a recitation without
pondering.” Methods for achieving mindful reading have been the subject of a vast
discourse in the canonical works of Sufism, the science of Islamic spirituality, (such
as al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyā’, Abū Tālib al-Makkī’s Qūt al-Qulūb and al-Qushayrī’s Risala).
Islamic theologians would agree that artificial agents do not deal with meaningful
information, and that there is a “semantic threshold” between humans and machines
that remains unassailable since human and artificial agents “belong to different
worlds” (Floridi 2014, pp. 137–138).
Developments in contemporary AI, and the mind and brain sciences are posing
new questions for understandings about human nature in Islamic philosophy and
theology. Contemporary scientific accounts about the nature of intentionality, voli-
tion, attention, memory, and imagination are being formulated which proceed on the
basis that subjective experience and “inner life” are the result of complex neurobio-
logical processes alone.

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Y. Chaudhary

More broadly, the infosphere, which entails the “re-ontologization of our environment
and of ourselves” (Floridi 2015, p. 15) to bring humans and machines into ontological
continuity as informational entities, raises the issue of how a culture with a “robust, ver-
tical ontology” such as Islam with “fundamental conceptions about human nature, the
value and meaning of life, the nature of the universe and our place in it…and so forth,”
(Floridi 2015, p. 299) will interact and interface with the minimal “lite and horizontal”
ontology of information ethics to address issues of digital ethics and governance.
For Islamic theology, intentions are more crucial than actions themselves, since
even if an action falls short or is interrupted before actualisation, an individual is still
rewarded based on their intention.
Hence, the issue of prayer-bots and religious worship becomes one of tracing the
intentional agent, or agents, in the system. In the case of prayers written by hand, we
may identify intentionality in the writer and reader. The acceptability of the prayer in
the sight of God may be amplified based on the spiritual state, sincerity and righteous-
ness of the one writing or reading the prayer, the time (such as during a sacred month)
and place (such as in a mosque or holy land).
Muslim houses often contain framed calligraphy with phrases of the Qur’an, duʿā’
and dhikr. One basic reason is to place words of remembrance of God in plain sight
since one may never know whether the moment of reading corresponds to a moment of
response and acceptance. Quite often these may be replicas, hence blessings (baraka)
instilled through the writer in the paper and ink remain with the original and the
prayer’s meaning is only brought into actualisation when read. Unlike Floridi’s ectypes,
focussing of one’s thoughts and movements of the limbs matter very much for what
counts as an authentic production (Floridi 2018). For example, Muslims believe that
food prepared while one is remembering God continuously is qualitatively better than
when one is unmindful of God. In the case of a prayer-bot, which simply retrieves text
from a database and pushes it to different accounts, automation severs the direct con-
nection to an intentioned writer and raises the question of whether the prayers make
contact with the minds (and souls) of humans who read them hence address them to
God as supplications.
The authors raise a highly significant issue that emerges from the increasing automa-
tion of online activity and the rise of interest in virtual personal assistants that handle
tasks on one’s behalf. The most prominent example is Google Duplex, which is able to
schedule appointments over the phone using natural speech. As data extraction probes
deeper levels of human psychology, physiological states, behavioural patterns and envi-
ronmental conditions to produce larger datasets to train AI based predictive algorithms,
there has been some discussion about the existence of digital doubles or twins that
comprehensively represent our “informational nature” and how they will, or whether
they should, handle online activities on our behalves in the future.

5 Digital Afterlife Industry

This leads to another major issue that Öhman et  al. raise in relation to the emer-
gence of the “digital afterlife industry”. This is based on the idea that “digital
remains” amount to new forms of digital objects that represent our “self-models”

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informationally. This leads to the possibility of virtual “resurrection” in the form

of digital avatars, which immortalise the informational self in a digital system by
allowing the self-model to output behaviour and process inputs.
The basic case is where a prayer-bot continues to access one’s account and send
tweets after a person’s death. This is in fact how some of the companies incentivise
the use of their services.
The authors are correct in their understanding that several factors may posthu-
mously increase one’s standing in the eyes of God. We add that this does not only
apply to ultimate judgement when the universe is ended and humankind is resur-
rected in another plane of existence, but also applies to reward and punishment
received in the grave. Qur’an 36:12 uses the word “āthār” meaning traces or foot-
prints to say that God records that which each individual “sends before and that
which they leave behind”. In addition, Qur’an 99:7 mentions that anyone who has
done an atom’s weight of good will see it, and anyone who has done an atom’s
weight of evil will see it. Hence, rewards will continue to be derived from an act
such as planting a seed to benefit future generations for the sake of God, as long as
the plant continues to benefit people, animals or the environment.
It remains questionable whether subscribing to a prayer service is ultimately as
beneficial and rewardable as charity and the establishment of endowments. In the
past, Muslims left portions of their inheritance for endowments so their wealth
would keep working for them in their favour. Muslims in some parts of the world
will recall, for example, endowments for animal welfare and even for the repair of
broken cutlery to protect children from being upset or told-off for having acciden-
tally broken cutlery at home.
The case of putting in motion an app to tweet or post prayers and the hybrid digi-
tal traces and footprints it generates is more complicated. First, as previously high-
lighted, it may be that the app posts messages, yet no human ever loads the Twitter
feed on their device to read the prayer. This raises further questions about whether
the digital representation of prayers stored on a server has any weight with God com-
pared to analogue representation (handwritten text) in a book. The broader issue that
requires the attention of Muslim philosophers and theologians is the nature and sta-
tus of virtual actions and objects in the infosphere and their informational ontology.
Second, it is questionable whether automated supplication, or sharing and
retweeting verses and prayers, represents the full sense of knowledge transmis-
sion intended in the hadith cited, although this activity may be considered a case
of spreading good by seeking to remind others of God and propagating messages of
peace and mercy.
Before concluding, we note several points from the analysis that require attention.
First, while expressions of worship may be among the most significant phenomena
on Twitter overall, as the authors suggest, the numbers of users involved are very
small compared to the Muslim population of over 1.5 billion, hence, the problem of
slipping into a “reductive framing” of Muslim issues will be a challenge for future
research (Ali 2019, personal communication).
Second, the authors speculate that “Islamic Twitter supplications will continue to
grow long after account holders have died.” At the moment, Twitter allows prayer-
apps to continue to post after the death of the account holder, in which case, the

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account is not identified as inactive. However, how this will be handled by the plat-
form in the future remains uncertain since it will be trivial for Twitter to differentiate
activity generated directly by the user or third parties, via Twitter’s APIs, with their
own access tokens. Hence, how the concept of “immortalising one’s social media
presence” will develop in the future remains an open question from both a secular
and religious framing.
Third, the authors cite Heidi Campbell who writes that “Engagement with media
is a religious imperative, one which Muslims will be held accountable for in the
afterlife.” However, it should be noted that this is the view of a particular lay-Mus-
lim preacher and tele-evangelists, and may not reflect the advice of Islamic scholar-
ship on engagement with new media. It should be noted that the Qur’an states every
individual is accountable according to their own capacities, hence it would be wrong
to assume that every ordinary Muslim is under an imperative to engage with media
and will be held accountable for not doing so, especially give the complexities of
media engagement.
Finally, we agree with the authors call for a wider research agenda to understand
the forces affecting religious practice in the ongoing transposition of an increasing
number of activities to the liminal space of the infosphere between the virtual and
real.
According to Floridi, the infosphere has blurred any distinction between online
and offline. This has led to the notion of the “onlife”, which is a new background
against which individuals “construct and maintain their personal identities online”
(Floridi 2011). In this context, ICTs are powerful “technologies of the self” which
are modifying both the contexts and practices that shape us (Floridi 2014, p. 59).
Construction of personal identity online (PIO) leads to distinctions between one’s
curated continuous online presence and one’s “offline” self. Allowing automated
agents to construct parts of online identity further complicates construction of PIO
(Hongladarom 2011). This raises many further complex issues related to religious
practice in the onlife that may arise in the future, least of which would be the emer-
gence of AI-based prayer-bots.
In other work, the authors write that human dignity necessitates control of one’s
identity and to be master of one’s own journey through the world, which applies
whether one is alive and after one’s death (Öhman and Floridi 2017, p. 11). This is
a crucial point of agreement between Islamic ethics and information ethics, which
both give a high priority to human dignity.
From the standpoint of this commentary, the work of Öhman et al. raises crucial
issues of how Islamic philosophy and theology will address the question of agency
in artificial agents, especially as they act on our behalves in increasing numbers of
activities. Floridi describes the real challenge of artificial agents as coming from the
“symbiotic mixture of biological and artificial, natural and engineered features to be
found in complex agents” (Floridi 2015, p. 159).
There is an increasing number of shared activities between humans and autono-
mous agents and more moral actions becoming the result of complex interactions
between systems within which an individual is embedded, leading to the issue
of “dealing with consequences that cannot be traced back directly to a human
being,” (Durante, 2017). As the interactions between individuals, society, machine

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entities, and public and private institutions continue to undergo rapid transforma-
tions, issues in the philosophy of information, digital ethics and governance of the
digital raise significant issues for Islamic philosophy and theology, requiring deeper
engagement between technologists, philosophers and theologians. We thank the
authors for advancing this area of research and the editor of the journal for inviting
these commentaries, which we hope will be an initial step forward in addressing the
challenges ahead.

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