Code and Creed: The Construction of AI‐Islamic Discourse in Singapore's Media Landscape

ABSTRACT This study examines how Singapore's mainstream media shapes public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) in Islamic contexts through analysis of newspaper coverage from 1989 to 2024. Drawing on computational analysis of over 620,000 articles from The Straits Times and The Business Times, we develop the concept of “double mediation” to explain how media simultaneously shapes understanding of both technological and Islamic domains while mediating their relationship. Through text analysis of 2978 AI‐Islamic sentences, we identify distinct patterns across four technological eras: pre‐internet (1989–1995), web (1996–2005), social media (2006–2015), and AI/ML (2016–2024). The findings reveal three key dynamics: increasingly sophisticated forms of double mediation, emergence of hybrid authority structures combining technological and religious expertise, and complex temporal politics in constructing techno‐religious futures. We demonstrate how media institutions actively construct new frameworks for understanding through “authority bridging practices” and “temporal harmonization,” rather than merely mediating between existing domains.