Fanar-Sadiq: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Grounded Islamic QA

TL;DR

Fanar-Sadiq is a multi-agent Islamic question-answering system that accurately handles diverse queries by routing them to specialized modules, ensuring grounded, citation-verified, and invariant responses in both Arabic and English.

Contribution

The paper introduces Fanar-Sadiq, a novel multi-agent architecture that effectively manages diverse Islamic queries with intent-aware routing and specialized modules, improving accuracy and reliability.

Findings

Effective routing to specialized modules improves answer accuracy.

Deterministic citation normalization and verification enhance trustworthiness.

System demonstrates high efficiency and has been widely accessed online.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) can answer religious knowledge queries fluently, yet they often hallucinate and misattribute sources, which is especially consequential in Islamic settings where users expect grounding in canonical texts (Qur'an and Hadith) and jurisprudential (fiqh) nuance. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) reduces some of these limitations by grounding generation in external evidence. However, a single ``retrieve-then-generate'' pipeline is limited to deal with the diversity of Islamic queries. Users may request verbatim scripture, fatwa-style guidance with citations or rule-constrained computations such as zakat and inheritance that require strict arithmetic and legal invariants. In this work, we present a bilingual (Arabic/English) multi-agent Islamic assistant, called Fanar-Sadiq, which is a core component of the Fanar AI platform. Fanar-Sadiq routes Islamic-related queries to specialized modules within an agentic, tool-using architecture. The system supports intent-aware routing, retrieval-grounded fiqh answers with deterministic citation normalization and verification traces, exact verse lookup with quotation validation, and deterministic calculators for Sunni zakat and inheritance with madhhab-sensitive branching. We evaluate the complete end-to-end system on public Islamic QA benchmarks and demonstrate effectiveness and efficiency. Our system is currently publicly and freely accessible through API and a Web application, and has been accessed $\approx$1.9M times in less than a year.