About this appearance
The AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva is the UN's flagship AI event. This panel, co-curated by Globethics and the Muslim Council of Elders, was the first at AI for Good to centre religious perspectives in the AI governance conversation. I was there as a Globethics Ethical AI Governance Fellow, alongside an interfaith scholar from India, a tech ethics director from Santa Clara University, an ITU standards chair from Tunisia, and an AI authenticity researcher. Dr. Fadi Daou, Executive Director of Globethics, moderated.
The argument I made is one I've been building for a while: law is inherently unstable (elections, rulers, political cycles), so if you want governance frameworks that last, you have to look at what shapes law in the first place — jurisprudence, and behind jurisprudence, religion. Not as doctrine. As the actual source of how billions of people understand safety, dignity, inclusion, and accountability. Of course, you might be wondering, what was I doing at a place like the AI for Good Summit in the first place. Well, to you, I say my friend, ich bin ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft ...
Click to play. 1:19 clip, English.
Selected Quotes
"The problem with law is law changes. You have your elections, you have your rulers, and law keeps changing all the time. So we try to look behind what is behind law, what is inside the jurisprudence. And that led us to religion."
"We like to not address the elephant in the room and we focus on the mosquito in the room. But the elephant is there. Right there. One of the most influential politicians of my generation, [Zohran Mamdani], the mayor of New York, was saying that people feel the safest in their respective houses of worship. Safety, inclusion — all of these concepts, all of these ideas that work behind the law, are shaped by people's understanding of religion."
"We may believe in a more secular liberal world. But that is not the only source of our understanding and our vision. And if we want to build something that's truly interoperable, truly shared across the world — we do not leave religion out of it."
"The encyclical of Pope Leo — that is something that will be shaping a lot of countries and their ideas about what AI should and should not do."
Related work
- SomosUPM — AI, Data, and Why Compliance Reports Are Always PDFs — the European data governance side of the same argument.
- La UE quiere que la IA escanee nuestros mensajes privados — The Conversation España, April 2026.
Event Details
- Date: 8 July 2026
- Venue: AI for Good Global Summit, Geneva
- Stage: Solutions Stage
- Format: Panel, 30 minutes
- Co-curated by: Globethics & Muslim Council of Elders
- Language: English
Panelists
- Alessandra Sala
- Rim Belhassine Cherif
- Chinmay Pandya
- Brian Patrick Green
- Meem Arafat Manab
- Mod: Fadi Daou (Globethics)
About the researcher
Meem Arafat Manab is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Fellow at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and a 2026 Globethics Ethical AI Governance Fellow.
Full Profile