The Charter
We gather in New York during a week the world has set aside for promises.
We have heard the promises before. Many of them have not survived the journey from podium to lived life, least of all for those whose suffering has been treated as the background to other people's progress. A mile from this room, the General Assembly will speak in the language of nations. We speak in another language: the language of the people who build the tools those nations now depend on, and the language of the people those tools are most often turned against.
We are technologists, founders, organizers, creators, financiers, scholars, and neighbors. We are Muslim and we are not only Muslim. We are of this city, of this country, of the ummah, and of a world being remade quickly, and often without our consent, by the very industries we ourselves help build.
We come to this week recalling the long record of declarations, charters, and covenants that the peoples of the world have written when their states could not or would not write them, and reaffirming that every generation inherits not only the tools of its age but the moral weight of how those tools are used.
We come recognizing that artificial intelligence is being deployed, at this very moment, against civilian populations, abroad and within the wealthiest nations of this world, whose names this hall has been trained to forget and whose data this industry has been trained to skip. We come noting with grave concern that the same systems being marketed as the future of human flourishing are being financed, trained, and deployed in ways that deepen the dispossession of the many for the convenience of the few.
We come convinced that the ummah and those who stand alongside it are not subjects of this technology but among its authors, its financiers, its workers, its scholars, and its critics. And we come determined that the promises made in this document will be measured not by the eloquence of their drafting but by the conditions of the lives they were written to change.
We refuse the choice between silence and slogan. We refuse the framing that asks us to be either subjects of technology or mascots for it. We are its authors, and during a week in which the world's institutions take their turn at the podium, we intend to take ours.
These declarations are what we stand for in the year ahead. Not as aspiration, but as commitment. We invite those who share them to sign their names, build alongside us, and be held to them.
Therefore we declare the following.
