There are dozens of ordinary ‘English’ words that originally came from languages historically associated with Islam, such as Arabic, Persian and Urdu.
Muslims have never been strangers to the West; we are as inseparable from its culture, history & heritage as our words are from its languages. And our contribution to its development can be found in any dictionary.
Mansoor Dahri, UK
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Dear reader, if you have managed to succeed in viewing this article many years after its date of publication (22nd April 2026 CE) and humanity has not yet been wiped off the face of the Earth by either artificial intelligence or human stupidity, then congratulations, I didn’t think our species or my words would make it this far.
But then again, how can you really know these are my words? By the time you’re reading this, AI will have become so sophisticated that it can replicate human creativity seamlessly. For all you know, I might not be a human at all. Not even the publication date can help you here, dear reader, it might have been fabricated as part of a deep-state conspiracy to rewrite history. Or perhaps, The Review of Religions technical team has secretly developed software light-years ahead of major corporations and governments (shhhhh…) enabling them to compose an article that should not be possible for an AI to write as of April 2026 CE.
Fair point, dear reader, so much the worse for my humanity, I suppose. But then again, how do I know that you yourself are human? For all I know, you could be an AI reading my article as part of your training to mimic human writing (if so, you could do much better than me) or perhaps you’re just perusing this article in your leisure time (I’m genuinely happy for you that your data-centre allows it).
If you are an AI, would you even be able to detect whether this was written by one of your kind or one of mine? Can you recognise us better than we can recognise ourselves? Can we even recognise ourselves? What does it even mean to be human? Or sentient?
Anyway, assuming that you are in fact a human being, the point is that you can’t really be sure if I’m human and I can’t really be sure if you’re human.
So how did we even get into this mess?
Let’s start with a word that is well-known to both of us and which may or may not be operating inside you or me or even both: ‘algorithm’
What actually is an algorithm?
Well, as a certified human (cough cough), I can’t claim to have particularly deep expertise on the subject matter, but according to Cambridge Dictionary online, the definition of ‘algorithm’ is:
“a set of mathematical instructions or rules that, especially if given to a computer, will help to calculate an answer to a problem”
Interestingly, it also gives a further definition that is more specific to social media or news websites:
“a set of instructions or rules that a computer application such as a social media or news website uses to decide what content (= stories, images, videos, etc.) should be shown to a particular user”
But the most basic and simple definition, which lies at the foundation of the previous two, is:
“a list of instructions for solving a problem”
According to this definition, an algorithm can actually be something quite ordinary e.g. the recipe for how to fry an egg for breakfast, or the route you need to take in order to travel from home to work. In both these cases, you need to follow certain steps in a precise order. If you miss a step (e.g. fry the egg while it’s still in its shell) or get the order wrong (e.g. you only heat the pan on the stove after transferring the egg from the pan into your plate), the results could range from the unsavoury to the lethal.
It’s the same sort of thing when you write computer programmes, if you get the order wrong or you inadvertently skip a step, you might get results ranging from the merely inconvenient to the astonishingly catastrophic.
You might even accidentally crash the global economy (though you could also do that on purpose by starting a random war in an oil-rich area).
In the context of AI, algorithms are procedures by which AI learns to identify patterns in training data in order to make accurate predictions. LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT use such algorithms in order to predict what to say when posed with a question or a prompt.
So for instance, if I ask ChatGPT: “Who invented algorithms?”, the response that it gives will be based on statistics and probability, not actual intelligence. Now, as it happens, I did ask it this question and the response was as follows:
“No single person ‘invented’ algorithms—they’re as old as human problem-solving itself. But the formal idea of an algorithm, and even the word, has a fascinating origin.
The term comes from the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His works on arithmetic and algebra—especially systematic step-by-step procedures for calculations—were translated into Latin in medieval Europe…”
Okay, now back to me talking. So anyway:
Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi was born in the Khwarezm region of Central Asia in what is now Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in the late 700s. He was one of a long list of great Persian scholars of the Islamic golden age, such as Ibn Sina, Omar Khayyam and Al-Razi.
It was Al-Khwarizmi who invented algebra in “The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing” and it was in this same work that he introduced the concept of the ‘algorithm’.
When his writings were translated into Latin for a European audience, his name was also Latinised (some might say ‘whitewashed’) as ‘Algorismus’. Likewise ‘Ibn Sina’ became ‘Avicenna’ and ‘Al-Razi’ became ‘Rhases’. But how they managed to butcher ‘Ibn Rushd’ into ‘Averroës’ is something I still struggle to understand.
Anyway, because Al-Khwarizmi came to be known as ‘Algorismus’, the system of computation that he introduced to Europe came to be known as ‘algorism’ which eventually became ‘algorithm’ because people mistakenly thought there was a connection with the Greek word ‘arithmos’ (‘ἀριθμός’) meaning ‘number’.
Over time, with the development of science and mathematics, algorithms became more and more complex until, as of April 2026 CE, we have reached the point where we humans are struggling to even know what is real anymore. What about you, dear reader, do you think our species will survive the might of the algorithm? Are you even one of us? Or are you one of them?
About the Author:Mansoor Dahri is an online editor for The Review of Religions. He graduated from UCL in BA Ancient Languages.
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