Voice of British Muslim Women

Iffat Mirza Rashid, Alton

The truth exists whether you like it or not. The issue is that if you dislike the truth enough and if you’re powerful enough, it can be buried and new ‘truths’ can be invented.

As they say, if you repeat a lie often enough, it eventually becomes the ‘truth’, and indeed, as life shows on multiple occasions, there is rarely a clear-cut ‘truth’ and ‘lie’. In fact, most often there are many competing truths, each given varying degrees of importance and attention. This can, of course, make it hard to have meaningful conversations when it is difficult to know all the facts and all the perspectives that make up a truth.

As a result, it is imperative, I think, to remember that the most convincing lies out there contain just an essence of diluted truth within them, thus making the lie no longer a ‘lie’ but simply a distortion, plausible enough to be believed. Like a house of mirrors, where confusion and chaos reign, where distorted images are shown; not entire fabrications, but inaccurate reflections of reality at every turn, the truth can be manipulated in our day-to-day interactions, in our media, and on the international stage.

Indeed, as His Holiness Mirza Masroor Ahmad (May Allah be his Helper) reminded us in his Friday Sermon on 24th April 2026, to rely on fabrications and falsehoods is akin to idol-worship, with the Holy Qur’an, chapter 22 verse 31 stipulating ‘Shun therefore the abomination of idols, and shun false speech’ because ultimately if we rely on our own lies to save us from difficult situations, it means that we simply regard our own deceptions as stronger than Allah’s power. It makes us lazy, unwilling to accept consequences, and deeply pessimistic.

This whole conversation has shifted rapidly since the arrival of mainstream generative artificial intelligence services, which have been known to hallucinate facts and citations. In an article published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the very term ‘AI hallucination’ is discussed, with the authors defining this as ‘the phenomenon where artificial intelligence generates distorted information’. The use of the term ‘distorted’ gives much food for thought – is it that a whole new lie is being created, divorced entirely from the truth, or is it that we receive a misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the truth?

The authors of the paper have also mentioned another term being proposed within the field, stating ‘some scholars advocate for the term “AI fabrication” as a replacement for “AI hallucination” to denote instances where AI systems generate false information’ and indeed this aspect of generative AI is being exploited to further certain agendas.

Though we’d be prone to thinking this is a uniquely 21st-century problem, that is not the case. In the same sermon, His Holiness (May Allah be his Helper) said this intentional fabrication of the truth was a great preoccupation for The Promised Messiah (on whom be peace) in the 19th century also. He reminded us ‘indeed, false witnesses, false cases, and even forged documents are common. People do not rely on speaking the truth but rely on saying what benefits them’.

It is not even just that in the 19th century this became a real concern, but the Holy Qur’an, revealed over 1,400 years ago, ‘O ye who believe! if an unrighteous person brings you any news, ascertain the correctness of the report fully, lest you harm a people in ignorance, and then become repentant for what you have done’. The explanation of this verse, beautifully expounded by His Holiness Mirza Bashiruddin Mahmood Ahmad (may Allah be pleased with him) in the Five Volume Commentary of the Holy Qur’an, tells us that this verse was revealed at a time when Islam was growing rapidly and neighbouring empires were anxious about a threat to their ways of life and rule. The wisdom of this is far beyond our comprehension – today, in an age of generative AI, it is of paramount importance that in every word we hear, or even every image or video we see, we must ‘ascertain the correctness of the report fully’. In order to do so, as individuals, we bear the responsibility to be proactive in our search for the truth and to proclaim it when we find it.

The truth can never be taken for granted. The stakes are simply too high. F Scott Fitzgerland opened one of his short stories ‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’, writing ‘There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age.’ Today, I wonder if we live in the distorted age.