AI Meets Faith: How Muslim Families in Bangladesh Navigate Religious Guidance
New study shows how technology is changing who families turn to for religious advice.
Digital technologies are reshaping how families negotiate care, authority, and responsibility, yet these dynamics remain understudied in religiously situated family life. Through interviews with 38 adult members of Bangladeshi Muslim families, we examine how family members guide one another across religious, digital, and AI-mediated contexts.
We find that authority did not simply follow age or family hierarchy: older members often remained sources of religious and familial guidance, while younger members increasingly provided expertise around digital risks, information credibility, and AI. Families also actively shaped digital environments and negotiated the role AI could occupy in everyday relationships.
We develop the concepts of household epistemic governance, counter-curation, and domain-dependent authority to explain these shifting relations of knowledge and responsibility. Our findings suggest opportunities for family technologies that support negotiated boundaries, credible information practices, and culturally situated forms of care.
- Smartphones and apps are changing how Muslim families in Bangladesh access religious guidance, with younger members often taking more active roles.
- Technology doesn't replace traditional authority but creates new negotiations about who interprets faith and how care is provided.
- This reflects a global trend where digital tools reshape religious practice and family dynamics.
Why It Matters
Shows how technology is quietly transforming religious authority and family relationships worldwide, affecting everyday faith practices.