ADDRESS
BY
HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS
SULTAN NAZRIN MUIZZUDDIN SHAH
AT THE
3RD INTERNATIONAL SUMMIT OF RELIGIOUS LEADERS 2026
DATE: FRIDAY, 12 JUN 2026
TIME: 3:40 PM
VENUE: KUALA LUMPUR CONVENTION CENTRE.
Religious Leaders and Youth:
Advancing Coexistence and Social Harmony
1. We meet in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous; a world whose geopolitical stakes, conflicts, and fractures have been well mapped by those who study such things. What I want to ask today is a different question: what does it take, on the ground, in communities, in relationships, to make peace real? I want to speak about the people inheriting this world, young people, and about the difference between simply declaring peace and doing the hard work of building it.
2. Let me begin not with a statistic, but with a face, because every statistic we discuss in this gathering has a face and a story.
3. Picture a seventeen-year-old. She has never set foot in a hall like this. She will never read the communique we issue at the close of this summit. But tonight, in a room lit only by the glow of a screen, she is being spoken to, patiently, persuasively, and persistently, by a voice telling her that the world is divided into ‘them’ and ‘us’; that her neighbour is her enemy; that her faith demands her rage.
4. That voice is not a scholar. It is not an imam, a priest, a rabbi, or a monk. It is an algorithm. And that algorithm is being deployed for profit by people who profess the very faith they are weaponizing.
5. AI-generated disinformation, dressed up in the vocabulary of grievance, now reaches hundreds of millions of young people at a scale and speed no sermon ever could. The argument for division is being won by voices we do not control, on platforms we do not own, in a language we have been too slow to learn. That is why I wish to speak today not about us, but about her, and the hundreds of millions like her.
6. Climate anxiety, conflict and displacement, economic insecurity, digital polarization, the erosion of institutional trust: these converge and reinforce one another in ways that resist simplistic remedies. And beneath them lies a quieter crisis: one of meaning, belonging, and trust. Young people today are asking fundamental questions. Where do I belong? Who can I trust? What values still matter? What future are we building together?
7. There are close to 1.8 billion young people on this earth; the largest generation in all human history.[1] Our own ummah is younger still: the median age of Muslims worldwide is around twenty-four, against a global median of roughly thirty, making Muslims the youngest of all faith communities on earth.[2]
8. The young do not merely inherit our conflicts; they bear them most heavily, and they are too often denied any hand in resolving them. In 2015, the United Nations Security Council acknowledged this when it adopted Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace and Security, recognizing that young people are not merely the victims of conflict, but among its most effective resolvers.[3] The verdict of the decade since is sobering. We have spent a great deal of time talking about young people, and far too little time listening to them and sharing power with them. The phrase the young peacebuilders themselves now use is exact, and it should sting us: they ask to be treated as co-creators, not consultants.[4] I put it to this assembly that faith leaders are uniquely placed to close that gap.
9. The violent extremist and the religious teacher are competing for the same young hearts, in the same sacred vocabulary. The extremist does not approach the young with a dry political manifesto. He comes clothed in scripture, quoting the very verses we quote. He invokes the same hunger for meaning, the same clarity of purpose, the same ache for dignity, and with great skill bends it away from mercy and towards grievance. He offers the sense of belonging that comes from having an imagined enemy. If all we offer in return is a sermon young people find remote, in a language they have stopped speaking, delivered inside a building they have stopped entering, then we have come armed with a manuscript to a contest being fought on iPhones.
10. Last month Pope Leo XIV issued his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.[5] He cautioned that access to limitless information must never be confused with wisdom; that the algorithm can inform a young mind, but it cannot form a young conscience. On this, a Catholic pontiff and a Muslim imam can speak with one voice: the screen can deliver information, but only a human being can deliver meaning.
11. If we surrender the work of belonging to the machine and its manipulators, we should not wonder where our young have gone. And so, the difficult question for every leader in this hall must be this: do the young people of your community experience your tradition as a living wellspring of belonging, or as an inheritance they are leaving behind?
12. We speak today as representatives of institutions that have, for centuries, served as anchors of meaning, belonging, and the moral life. But we must be honest: these anchors have come loose. The 2026 Edelman Barometer[6] paints a sobering picture. Seven in ten people globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values or beliefs. Only one in three believes the next generation will be better off. Religious institutions are not exempt from this decline, and we do ourselves no favours by pretending otherwise.
13. This is where religious leadership has a vital role to play. At its best, religion teaches us to look beyond the self. It reminds us that human beings are not merely consumers, competitors, or avatars in a digital crowd, but persons of dignity and moral worth.
14. To engage the young, religious leadership must be both rooted and responsive. Rooted because communities need the wisdom, discipline and moral depth that tradition provides. Responsive because each generation encounters new realities and asks new questions. The task is not to dilute faith for our youth, nor to abandon inherited wisdom, but to bring that wisdom into living conversation with the conditions of the present world.
15. We often speak of young people as the future. But let us think about what this quietly implies: that their time has not yet come, that the present moment belongs to those already holding authority. That framing, however well-meaning, is one of the most common mistakes institutions make.
16. For young people are the present. They are organizing, innovating, mobilizing movements, and reshaping public discourse in the digital and physical spaces we share. In many ways, they are ahead of us, more connected across borders, more at ease with difference than their elders ever were. Our task should be to nurture their idealism, to keep it from souring into cynicism or being captured by those who would turn its energy to ruinous ends.
17. The Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alaiyhi wassalam, taught us that the best people are those most beneficial to others.[7] He did not say the most learned, the most powerful, the eldest, or the most senior. By that measure, a generation hungry to be of use is not our anxiety to be contained. It is our hope to be unleashed.
18. The question is not whether young people are ready to participate. They have been participating — despite us, around us, and often without us. The question is whether institutions are ready to treat the young as co-creators, partners, and architects of the societies they are already shaping.
19. Yet we must be honest about the world in which they have come of age. This is a generation growing up amid extraordinary noise. Although they are more connected than any generation before them, many young people experience deep loneliness. They have unprecedented access to knowledge, and yet must navigate misinformation, cynicism, hatred, and distortion. They encounter difference everyday, but often in digital spaces designed to reward outrage and bullying. In such an environment, coexistence can no longer be assumed. It must be taught, practiced, protected, and renewed.
20. Southeast Asia has often been described as a fertile garden in which many strains of spirituality have flowered side by side; a place where, across centuries, the faithful of many persuasions have learned to live together in harmony rather than fear. This is a hard-won civilizational achievement. In Malaysia, we understand that harmony is not the same as uniformity. Our society has been shaped by many cultures, languages, ethnicities, and religions. This diversity is one of our greatest strengths, and it is precisely the inheritance we are now charged with handing to the young.
21. The Charter of Madinah understood this. It was not merely an administrative arrangement; it was a moral operating system that allowed profoundly diverse communities to coexist in dignity and shared responsibility. Its lesson for us is not merely historical. It is a standing challenge, a reminder that an institution is only ever as good as the values it practices, not the values it proclaims. And which institutions are better at changing hearts, one by one, until a whole society turns, than the institutions of faith gathered in this room?
22. This wisdom is not the property of any single tradition; it is the common ground upon which they all meet. The Quran tells us that God made us into nations and tribes so that we may come to know one another. The Gospel calls peacemakers blessed. The Torah commands that we love the stranger, for we ourselves were once strangers. The Buddhist teaches that hatred is never appeased by hatred, but only by love. The Hindu greets the divine in the other with a single word — namaste. Confucius taught that within the four seas, all are brothers. Five different religions, but one single message: the stranger is not the enemy. This is the treasure we hold in common, and it is the treasure we must place, deliberately, into young hands.
23. Let me return to where I began — to that seventeen-year-old, alone with the glow of her screen.
24. We will not reach her with a communique. We will not reach her with our titles, our protocol, or our seniority. And we will certainly not reach her by leaving her, as the encyclical from Rome reminds us, to the influence of a machine that can supply her with endless information but not a single ounce of wisdom or love. We will reach her only if she encounters, somewhere in her real and ordinary life, a faith more compelling than the counterfeit being whispered to her, a faith made visible by someone close to her own age who has been trusted, equipped, and sent.
25. That is within our power to realize. We can keep speaking about the young, or we can begin to speak with them. Let me offer four concrete commitments, not as lofty aspirations, but as work to begin here and continue when we return to our homes and places of worship.
26. First, give the young real authority, not just ceremonial roles. Our forums, including gatherings such as this one, should reserve decision-making seats for those under thirty. Not a panel exiled to the final afternoon after the cameras have gone home, but a vote in the room where decisions are made.
27. Second, meet them where they actually are. The extremist has mastered the very platforms many of us still disdain. We must equip, fund, and, hardest of all, trust the young believers who already speak that language fluently, sending them with a message of mercy into spaces where hatred goes unopposed. The most powerful answer to a nineteen-year-old extremist online is a nineteen-year-old of deeper faith and greater courage.
28. Third, make encounters ordinary, not exceptional. The surest antidote to the clash of ignorance is disarmingly simple: a young Muslim, a young Christian, a young Hindu, a young Buddhist who have broken bread together, played football together, cleared a flooded street together after the monsoon. Through such encounters, coexistence becomes more than tolerance. It becomes friendship. It becomes the discovery that another person’s difference need not diminish one’s own identity, but may instead deepen one’s understanding of our shared humanity.
29. Fourth, address the grievance, not only the symptom. Extremism does not recruit from contentment. It recruits from the young men in Mindanao who cannot find work; from the teenager in the deprived suburbs of Paris who has been regularly stopped by police since she was fourteen; from the graduate in Cairo who was promised that education would open doors and has watched them close, one by one. It recruits, in short, wherever institutions have made people feel that their dignity is conditional.
30. To the religious leaders assembled here, I say this: Let our gathering be a commitment to mentorship, to partnership, and to practical action. Let us build spaces where young people of different faiths and backgrounds can meet one another as fellow citizens and as fellow human beings. Let us equip them to speak truthfully, to listen generously, and to lead courageously.
31. To the young people present, I would like to stress this above all: Do not allow anyone to convince you that the dignity of your faith depends on diminishing the dignity of another. As the Holy Quran makes abundantly clear, Allah subhanahu wata’ala could, had He so willed, have made us all into a single community — one religion, one race, and one nation — but He chose otherwise, and instructed us instead to compete with one another in goodness.[8]
32. The future of our faith, and of the coexistence between every tradition represented in this hall, will not be secured by one generation alone. It will be secured when wisdom and youth walk together: when sacred traditions open hearts; when inherited values are renewed through living action; and when harmony is carried forward not as a fragile slogan, but as a shared discipline.
33. In an age of fragmentation, coexistence becomes an act of courage. In an age of cynicism, radical hope becomes resistance. And in an age of noise, perhaps the greatest gift these traditions of ours can offer — and which no algorithm can replicate — is Sakinah: the grounded peace from which compassion, trust, and genuine belonging can grow. Our task is not to manage the diversity of this world. It is to help humanity remember how to belong to one another again.
34. Our Prophet, sallallahu ‘alaiyhi wassalam, taught us that if the Final Hour itself were upon us and a sapling was in our hand, we should still plant it.[9] That is what we owe the young: not a sermon about the storm, but a seedling pressed into their palm. Let us be the ones who handed them a sapling, a reason to believe and a seat at the table.
- United Nations/UNFPA, World Youth Report. The 15-24 cohort alone exceeds 1.2 billion, with the broader youth population approaching 1.8 billion. ↑
- Pew Research Center, analysis of the global religious landscape. ↑
- UN Security Council Resolution 2250 (2015) on Youth, Peace and Security; tenth-anniversary High-Level Stocktaking, December 2025. ↑
- The framing of youth as “co-creators, not consultants” was reaffirmed at the UNSCR 2250 tenth anniversary events New York, December 2025. ↑
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, 15 May 2026. ↑
- Edelman Trust Barometer 2026. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust/trust-barometer. ↑
- Related by al-Tabarani. ↑
- Surah al-Ma’idah 5:48. ↑
- Related by Ahmad. ↑