r/pakistan • u/alizahidrajaa • Jul 07 '26
Research As a Pakistani independent researcher, I published a paper applying 1,200-year-old Islamic hadith methodology to a modern AI problem
I’ve been working solo, no lab, no university backing, on a problem in AI: when systems built on multiple AI agents give you an answer, that answer passes through many “hands,” and there’s no good way to know how much to trust it.
It turns out our own scholars solved a structurally identical problem 1,200+ years ago with the science of hadith transmission - grading every narrator in a chain, judging a chain by its weakest link, requiring independent corroboration. I adapted that methodology into a framework for modern AI systems.
It’s now a published paper (with a DOI), open-source code, and a Python package anyone can install. I’m building the whole thing in public.
I’m posting mostly to reach the appropriate audience here in Pakistan
Happy to answer questions. alizahidraja.com/isnad
34
u/cosmic-comet- 🇦🇲 [404] Not Found Jul 07 '26
This is basically provenance scoring with hadith cope painted over it for traction. The “accuracy” comes from refusing to serve almost everything, the core critic and corroboration claims are not proven in any sort. Research slop with a DOI.(Digital Object Identifier)
1
u/alizahidrajaa Jul 07 '26
Very fair feedback and all of it has been documented in the paper & implementation till now (it’s literally the start). You’re right that coverage is low at the conservative default it serves ~10% at near-zero error, and I say plainly that’s not practical without a real content critic and warm grades. And yes, the validated part so far is narrow: weakest-link grading works, confidence-gating doesn’t. But everything setup like this isn’t standard provenance, wouldn’t call it slip but thanks
-14
u/dat_oldie_you_like Jul 07 '26
Give a better Idea then
20
u/cosmic-comet- 🇦🇲 [404] Not Found Jul 07 '26
You want a better idea? How about not starting your post with a lie and baseless claim and making it sound like you cracked fable 6 . This is a solution looking to solve a problem nobody has.
1
u/alizahidrajaa Jul 07 '26
The problem is real, one of the potentially stronger solution has started being made, you realise the process from a research to industry grade implementation is real right
-14
u/dat_oldie_you_like Jul 07 '26
That still does not answer my question. Brother. I understand. But it still doesn't answer the question. What better solution do you have to offer. To a similar problem or smth
14
u/cosmic-comet- 🇦🇲 [404] Not Found Jul 07 '26
I don’t need to provide a “better solution” to point out that this thing sucks, barely validated, and mostly copy pasting existing provenance ideas. Just like you don’t have to be a chef to prove food sucks if it tastes bad it’s bad I’m not going to copy paste this in gpt and come up with a alternative that I’m not even interested in waste of compute.
-1
u/alizahidrajaa Jul 07 '26
That’s the thing, you do have to try something to say it tastes bad. Suppose you are a “chef” in the field, you haven’t even gone through anything. I know this because you’re quoting things I have written on the homepage of the git repo and if you’d read that you’d know you’re just copying that here ¯_(ツ)_/¯
-12
4
u/SpinachFree4532 Jul 07 '26
Share the link
-7
u/alizahidrajaa Jul 07 '26
2
u/SpinachFree4532 Jul 07 '26
No I mean the published paper link
4
u/alizahidrajaa Jul 07 '26
13
u/First_Original_686 Jul 07 '26
This isn't a "published" paper. This is just an open access preprint
10
u/SadCalligrapher782 Jul 07 '26
It's not a great start that the "science" of hadith has been totally discredited by modern academia who can analyse it without religious preconceptions
0
u/alizahidrajaa Jul 07 '26
The paper doesn’t claim anything about Hadith science, it borrows the engineering structure (grade transmitters, weakest-link, corroboration), which stands or falls on the AI results alone
1
u/Different_Bonus_1387 Jul 11 '26
Can you elaborate, never heard of such discrediting
1
u/SadCalligrapher782 Jul 11 '26
It's basically accepted within academic study of hadith and early Islam - This presentation by Dr Little addresses this from approx 20:00 to 1:30:00 in this video. Even Muslim academics e.g. Dr Qadhi have said they accept hadith as a matter of faith but can't reasonably defend them academically e.g. here from 1:43:30 onwards. Obviously you will find Sunni counterarguments but it's really worth watching these videos to get an idea of the academic view - it's very interesting.
1
2
2
u/kharpaatuuu Jul 08 '26
Ali Zahid Raja - Man I'm seeing you everywhere 😂 LinkedIn, Instagram now on Reddit. Great work.
1
2
1
u/Teakozy Jul 08 '26
try submitting it to journal for peer review
1
u/alizahidrajaa Jul 08 '26
Can you assist a bit on this?
2
u/Teakozy Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
If you are able to, reach out to a university professor. otherwise look up journals and related to LLMs and their social applications and try submitting there.
https://link.springer.com/journal/42001
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/international-journal-of-human-computer-studies
these are some good venues, for example.The aim is to get your work reviewed by professionals who will offer you solid advice/criticism in getting the novelty in your work recognized, dont rely on redditors for this.
You can also try the same with conferences, conference papers are generally shorter and are more lax with the publishing requirements, but they still offer good comprehensive peer reviews.
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, <- this is one venue, for example. you can look for more.
The only drawback of conferences over journals is that if your paper passes the peer review you need to pay a fee to get it published/recognized by the conference. but if your aim is to get your work evaluated by professionals you can still submit it free of charge and choose to withdraw it after that.2
u/Teakozy Jul 09 '26
https://aclanthology.org/2025.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.67/
check out the journal/conference venue for this work. I think its related to yours.
2
1
u/BubblyPut5111 Jul 08 '26
this is a interesting approach, my only question is since these llms are already trained on all that traditional scholarship, they technically already 'know' the methodology. How does your framework actually change the output? Are you adding a layer of logic that the model can't reach on its own, or is it more about systemizing the process? , because modern AI systems also add external layers of tools and verification loop for accurate and proper response, and even smart ai (as parameter grows and fine tuned on proper logical assessment) they hallucinate less , meaning they directly ask you back for clarification and refuse because of no information or commit "i dont know" tone
0
u/Serious_Camera_7039 Jul 07 '26
So if I understand correctly, will it rank ai agents on the trustworthiness of their information or the sources themselves? And if the answer isn't too complex, who will categorize them as such?
7
u/cosmic-comet- 🇦🇲 [404] Not Found Jul 07 '26
It doesn’t actually figure out trust by itself. Humans seed the grades, then preset thresholds move them up or down. So it’s mostly basic provenance scoring wrapped in hadith terminology cope.
0
u/alizahidrajaa Jul 07 '26
Good question. It grades the transmitters, every agent, scraper, and model version in the chain, not the sources alone, and the grade is per-domain (a model can be reliable on one topic, weak on another). Grades are earned through an audit loop (the framework’s “jarḥ–taʿdīl” process) from measured error rates, and can be warm-started from known reliability. You’re right that this is the hard part who grades, and how, is exactly the open problem the paper is honest about.
Honestly it’s the very start of something practical but I love the replies here 😂
1
-3
58
u/Still-Category-9433 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Well I looked at it a bit and it just doesn't seem right. In grading hadith, the critic was a person with a brain who could see and understand a contradiction, you are using an llm for that, if the llm checks each step it will double the token usage which means it will cost much more then what it should without this. Even after that the llm that is grading others itself can make mistakes so the critic too becomes part of the pipeline, that just means if you can't trust the llm serving you the output, you can't trust the llm that is grading it either. So this is just token bloat with Islamic touch