AI and Images of the Unimaginable: Islamic Eschatology on TikTok

Public lecture with Christoph Günther.

Muslim content creators use AI-generated texts and images to illustrate Qurʾanic passages and hadith narrations, creating visually engaging content to promote ethical guidance and pious conduct. In this lecture, we will discuss how AI technologies mediate religious expression and imagination of the afterlife in the digital age and the blending of sacred and secular visual vocabularies in the pursuit of piety.

Christoph Günther is the Heisenberg Professor of Religious Studies with a focus of Religious Media Practices at the Department of Religious Studies, Universität Erfurt. Trained in Islamic Studies, History, and Arabic, his research and teaching touch upon issues of religion and digital media, visual culture, as well as social change and the role of religio-political actors therein. His current research focuses on the ways in which Muslim actors design audiovisual mediations on social media platforms and how Muslim practitioners engage with such videos and images. He is the author of Entrepreneurs of Identity: The Islamic State’s Symbolic Repertoire (Berghahn Books, 2022) as well as co-editor of Jihadi Audiovisuality and its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Disentangling Jihad, Political Violence and Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).