HWS News
3 October 2025 • Research Discoveries in AI Art
Students and Professor of Religious Studies Etin Anwar spent the summer researching Islamic art and AI’s ability to recreate it.
As artificial intelligence-generated images become increasingly prominent, Professor of Religious Studies Etin Anwar, Alberto García de la Puente Stanley ’25 and Fairooj Suhita ’27 spent the summer exploring how Islamic art is represented— and often misrepresented—by artificial intelligence.
The three began by examining how the prohibition of using pictorial images in Islam dominates the conversation about Islamic arts and how such conversations have fostered interests among Muslims to develop a visual identity associated with calligraphy, arabesque and floral motifs, geometric patterns, miniatures and other expressions. From there, the students read on AI, including its history, its biases and ethics. With the knowledge learned from both topics, the students used the AI art platforms Gemini and Dalle to try and create Islamic art.
The AI was unsuccessful in providing accurate pictures, with illegible Arabic calligraphy and mismatched architectural details, but provided useful lessons.
“In all, the research experience taught us about the importance of studying non-Western cultural and religious perspectives and their place in AI platforms,” says Anwar. “We have learned that our prompts matter because they can be used to train AI about the past in Islamic arts to understand the cultural portrayal of Islam better in the future.”
De la Puente Stanley, a studio art and architectural studies major, found the work “fascinating to understand and differentiate Islamic art from a Muslim perspective instead of a Western mentality” and was surprised to learn how prevalent Islamic art is in many Christian cultures.
The accuracy of the depiction for the images remains linked to the information given to AI, Anwar says. “We learned about effective prompts that are built based on our understanding of Islamic arts.”
Anwar’s interest in how AI portrays Islamic images arose with the prevalence of AI itself. Through AI platforms such as Playform, Lensa and Midjourney, she studied AI biases in portraying Muslim women. The creations often featured inaccurate clothing.
This summer’s work presented an opportunity to build on that research.
A large focus of the initial research revolved around topics such as the assumed prohibition of figurative art and the rise of non-figurative arts and architectures within various regions in the Muslim world, pictorial images in Islamic theology, the Prophet Muhammad’s exposures to figurative arts from the Byzantine civilization, Islamic symbolism in art, Islamic calligraphy and AI ethics in Islam.
Top: Professor of Religious Studies Etin Anwar chats with Fairooj Suhita ’27.
