Assessing Large Language Models on Islamic Legal Reasoning: Evidence from Inheritance Law Evaluation
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This paper evaluates the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models in Islamic inheritance law, known as ʿilm almawārīth.We assess the performance of seven LLMs using a benchmark of 1,000 multiplechoice questions covering diverse inheritance scenarios, designed to test each model's ability-from understanding the inheritance context to computing the distribution of shares prescribed by Islamic jurisprudence.The results reveal a significant performance gap: o3 and Gemini 2.5 achieved accuracies above 90%, whereas ALLaM, Fanar, LLaMA, and Mistral scored below 50%.These disparities reflect important differences in reasoning ability and domain adaptation.We conduct a detailed error analysis to identify recurring failure patterns across models, including misunderstandings of inheritance scenarios, incorrect application of legal rules, and insufficient domain knowledge.Our findings highlight the limitations of current models in handling structured legal reasoning and suggest directions for improving their performance in Islamic legal reasoning.
Institution: Qatar University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4416037665