NLP, Sharīʿah Governance, and the Future of Islamic Finance: A Regulatory Imperative

Abstract

The rapid emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs), is reshaping the global financial industry, and Islamic finance is gradually entering this technological phase. AI-assisted systems are increasingly being used for customer interaction, contract analysis, document classification, sharīʿah screening, summarization of fatāwa, compliance review, and support for sharīʿah audit functions (Jokhio and Jaffer, 2024).

The broader use of AI-supported customer interaction systems among the gulf Islamic banks, including Dubai Islamic Bank,Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, and Kuwait Finance House has been highlighted in contemporary literature on AI in Islamic banking and digital financial services. Recent studies note the increasing deployment of multilingual AI chatbots, virtual assistants, and machine-learning-supported customer-service systems to facilitate banking assistance, enhance customer experience, and improve self-service support mechanisms (Hasan et al., 2022; Jan et al., 2023; IFSB, 2024).