I searched for a tone that would not flatter a weary age, and the sky itself offered a ready language for reflection: a ring of fire in an annular eclipse; another calendar, in the Chinese East, opening onto the “Year of the Fire Horse,” the emblem of rapid change; and in the West, Ash Wednesday announcing the beginning of Lent. Fire in the sky, ash on the forehead, fasting on the earth. Perhaps this is not merely a coincidence of dates, but a reminder that restraint has become rarer than speech.
The argument is simple: fasting is not only ritual—it is training. And the age we inhabit is an age of speed without reins: in technology, in politics, in ethics, and in society. Whoever does not learn to govern himself will struggle to defend the governance of his own mind and heart—at the very moment when power is written in layers, not slogans.
A small irony stopped me. In the middle of this cosmic and spiritual weight, I found myself thinking of Pancake Day. Not because the world has become light—but because when the mind tightens, it sometimes reaches for a playful detail to explain a heavy truth. Thin, round pancakes stacked one on top of another: layers upon layers, each concealing what lies beneath and revealing what lies above—yet all consumed in a single bite.
But the “stack” I mean is not culinary. It is the AI stack: chips, data centres, language models, algorithms, platforms, applications. Each layer quietly renames authority without calling it authority. And from the humour of pancakes I turned to a heavier question: if this is the condition of AI stacks globally, what of the Arab and Islamic stack—our language model, our culture, our jurisprudence? Who carries the ethical, regulatory, and technical leadership? Who holds the reins of speed before speed tramples us in the name of progress? Perhaps the Qur’anic image is more precise than any description: “You will surely ride, layer upon layer.”
From here the answer emerges—not as a nationalist slogan, but as a civilizational function. Saudi Arabia—land of the doctrine of managing stages—is not asked to raise the banner alone, but to carry, in the balance of nations, both banner and model. How does one govern a stage when tools accelerate and values decelerate? How do we establish a backbone for the governance of technology—one that neither reduces us to dependency nor imprisons us in fear of the future?
Then comes the harsh paragraph—after delivering the opening address in Rome at the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT): how do civilizations slip? Not necessarily through a dramatic collapse, but through a deviation that legalizes itself until it becomes “normal.” I was contemplating the shadows of the Vatican in a sunny day in a grey winter, and I recalled an old saying: empires do not fall at the gates, but when corruption seeps into the foundations of conscience. That meaning has screamed at the world recently through the Epstein files—not as gossip, but as a sign of rupture between language and ethics, between institutions and the meaning of protection, when violation is managed as if it were a “respectable structure.”
From that moral slippage we arrived at Munich: the security conference as the planet’s thermometer, measuring not only danger but clarity. There came a speech by the U.S. Secretary of State describing the United States as “Europe’s child”—a phrase that suggests a belated apology for a civilizational drift now read in those “files” as a symbol, not an individual scandal. On the other side, Europe replied that digital sovereignty is a red line—and that whoever does not hold the keys to his technical layers does not truly hold his decision. It is as if the world is saying plainly: alliances are revising themselves, the economy is being redefined, and sovereignty is being written in the stack—not only in treaties and maps.
Yet the point is not panic. In times like these, we learn what we cannot control—so at least we control ourselves. When the noise grows loud around you, you can re-order your interior with a simple act: fasting, healing, reflection, reducing reactivity, returning to meaning.
So if one addition belongs to the spirit of fasting this year, it is this: a digital fast. Not a rejection of technology, but the refinement of our relationship to it. Daily hours without platforms, without compulsory feeds, without a stack that steals your attention and then sells you back to yourself. A fast that returns to you sovereignty over your heart and mind before we speak of sovereignty over networks. Whoever learns to hold the reins of himself will not fail to defend the reins of his society.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and is tested in the world.
Educational note
The AI Stack refers to the layered system that makes modern AI possible: chips, data centres, models, algorithms, platforms, and applications. Control over the lower layers translates into real influence over decision-making and knowledge. Today’s contest is increasingly framed as a competition between a dominant U.S. stack and a rising Chinese stack.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.