arXiv subjects

Mahmoud Fawzi

Publications and source records attributed to Mahmoud Fawzi.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

IslamicMMLU: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Islamic Knowledge

Large language models are increasingly consulted for Islamic knowledge, yet no comprehensive benchmark evaluates their performance across core Islamic disciplines. We introduce IslamicMMLU, a benchmark of 10,013 multiple-choice questions spanning three tracks: Quran (2,013 questions), Hadith (4,000 questions), and Fiqh (jurisprudence, 4,000 questions). Each track is formed of multiple types of questions to examine LLMs capabilities handling different aspects of Islamic knowledge. The benchmark is used to create the IslamicMMLU public leaderboard for evaluating LLMs, and we initially evaluate 26 LLMs, where their averaged accuracy across the three tracks varied between 39.8% to 93.8% (by Gemini 3 Flash). The Quran track shows the widest span (99.3% to 32.4%), while the Fiqh track includes a novel madhab (Islamic school of jurisprudence) bias detection task revealing variable school-of-thought preferences across models. Arabic-specific models show mixed results, but they all underperform compared to frontier models. The evaluation code and leaderboard are made publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Fabricating Holiness: Characterizing Religious Misinformation Circulators on Arabic Social Media

Misinformation is a growing concern in a decade involving critical global events. While social media regulation is mainly dedicated towards the detection and prevention of fake news and political misinformation, there is limited research about religious misinformation which has only been addressed through qualitative approaches. In this work, we study the spread of fabricated quotes (Hadith) that are claimed to belong to Prophet Muhammad (the prophet of Islam) as a case study demonstrating one of the most common religious misinformation forms on Arabic social media. We attempt through quantitative methods to understand the characteristics of social media users who interact with fabricated Hadith. We spotted users who frequently circulate fabricated Hadith and others who frequently debunk it to understand the main differences between the two groups. We used Logistic Regression to automatically predict their behaviors and analyzed its weights to gain insights about the characteristics and interests of each group. We find that both fabricated Hadith circulators and debunkers have generally a lot of ties to religious accounts. However, circulators are identified by many accounts that follow the Shia branch of Islam, Sunni Islamic public figures from the gulf countries, and many Sunni non-professional pages posting Islamic content. On the other hand, debunkers are identified by following academic Islamic scholars from multiple countries and by having more intellectual non-religious interests like charity, politics, and activism.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

"The Prophet said so!": On Exploring Hadith Presence on Arabic Social Media

Hadith, the recorded words and actions of the prophet Muhammad, is a key source of the instructions and foundations of Islam, alongside the Quran. Interpreting individual hadiths and verifying their authenticity can be difficult, even controversial, and the subject has attracted the attention of many scholars who have established an entire science of Hadith criticism. Recent quantitative studies of hadiths focus on developing systems for automatic classification, authentication, and information retrieval that operate over existing hadith compilations. Qualitative studies on the other hand try to discuss different social and political issues from the perspective of hadiths, or they inspect how hadiths are used in specific contexts in official communications and press releases for argumentation and propaganda. However, there are no studies that attempt to understand the actual presence of hadiths among Muslims in their daily lives and interactions. In this study, we try to fill this gap by exploring the presence of hadiths on Twitter from January 2019 to January 2023. We highlight the challenges that quantitative methods should consider while processing texts that include hadiths and we provide a methodology for Islamic scholars to validate their hypotheses about hadiths on big data that better represent the position of the society and Hadith influence on it.

cs.SI↗