The shrinking horizon. What we lost since 2019.

When I wrote The Finding Itihad, I was thinking about unity, not as an institution, but as a revelation. Itihad for me was never political. It meant the possibility of world harmony through interreligious dialogue: the idea that the divine might still speak across languages, creeds, and histories if we learn to listen. The Finding itself alludes to the Finding of Jesus in the Temple, the moment of rediscovery, when something once thought lost is glimpsed again, alive, radiant, and necessary. It represented for me a kind of hope: that amid fracture, humanity might yet find its moral center.

I return to that word, finding, as I look at the Global Risks Report 2025 from the World Economic Forum of ealrier this year. Six years ago, the 2019 edition had warned that the world was “sleepwalking into catastrophe.” But it was a catastrophe defined by the planet by melting ice, by rising seas, by the fragility of the atmosphere. For all its anxiety, the tone was still communal. We disagreed on methods, but we agreed on the threat. Climate change and environmental degradation were the common denominator of our fear, the rare subject around which secular reason and spiritual imagination could still meet. It was a fragile consensus, but it existed. In that sense, 2019 was the last year of coherence.

By contrast, the 2025 report feels as if it were written from another civilisation. The hierarchy of risk has changed. The first danger now is war, state-based armed conflict, the blunt phrase that conceals human suffering. Then come misinformation and societal polarization. Climate change still occupies the long-term horizon, but in the short term, the mind of the world has turned inward. The planet is still burning, but our attention has been captured by our quarrels. It is not that the environmental crisis has lessened, in fact, every metric shows it worsening, but that the moral space in which we could confront it together has disintegrated.

Reading the 2019 and 2025 reports side by side is like tracing the contraction of human vision. In 2019, the world still believed in global reasoning, in the possibility of collective thought, of coordination, of mitigation and adaptation. By 2025, the language has hardened. It is the vocabulary of defence: protection, sovereignty, resilience. Where once there was a shared horizon, now there are walls of perception. The horizon itself has shrunk.

I cannot read these documents without hearing an echo of the themes that moved me when I wrote The Finding Itihad. The crisis we face is not only environmental or geopolitical; it is spiritual. When I spoke of Itihad, I was referring to a unity that could only emerge through dialogue; the meeting of faiths, the humility to learn from what we once opposed. The 2019 report, in its own secular way, reflected a faint shadow of that same aspiration. It imagined the Earth as a temple: a place that belonged to no single creed, but demanded reverence from all. In that year’s hierarchy of risks, extreme weather events, failure of climate mitigation, and water scarcity stood at the top. Not because they were fashionable, but because they were universal. Everyone would suffer; therefore, everyone had a stake.

But between that moment and now, the sacred geometry of global concern has broken apart. The new list of dangers tells us not what has changed in the Earth’s condition, but what has changed in our hearts. We have grown unable to sustain attention on what is distant, slow, and shared. We chase the urgent and neglect the essential. The human mind, saturated by conflict and misinformation, no longer registers the slow violence of the planet’s transformation. The world has not grown more fragile, only more fragmented.

The 2025 report is filled with charts and probabilities, but behind the data lies a confession: humanity has lost the ability to think together. Where the 2019 report spoke the language of interdependence, the new one speaks the language of suspicion. I do not blame the authors; they are describing what they see.

This is where I return to Itihad. I wrote that world unity would not come through politics, but through dialogue — through the rediscovery of the sacred across traditions. I believed then, and still believe now, that interreligious understanding is the last remaining architecture of peace. When I look at the WEF’s shifting risk landscape, I see not only the failure of policy but the exhaustion of meaning.

The Finding Itihad was never meant as a prophecy, but as a meditation on possibility. To find the divine in the temple is to remember that wisdom dwells among us, waiting to be recognised. The messianic hope is not a figure descending from the sky, but a renewal of vision the widening of the horizon once more. Between the 2019 and 2025 reports lies that entire spiritual journey: from the unity of concern to the solitude of fear. What we must now recover is not simply cooperation, but communion.

The reports describe risk; what they cannot measure is grace. That, perhaps, is where the true work begins, in the spaces between their numbers, in the quiet rediscovery of meaning. The horizon may have shrunk, but it is still there. And if we can look up long enough, we may yet find again what we once lost: the wisdom in the temple, and the voice that still calls us toward one another.