King Charles III - defender of Islam

Perhaps one of the most unlikely contemporary defenders of Islam, from a perspective that is at least informed by Traditionalism, is Charles, Prince of Wales (Millar 2016)

Prince Charles @ Mohammedi Park Mosque Complex, Northolt, England, 19 March 1996.

Content

Introduction
Evidence
Comments
References

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Abstract: Charles Mountbatten-Windsor (b.1948), former Prince of Wales and currently King Charles III of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, has long defended Islam, often in association with his support for inter-faith dialogue, nature and the environment. His alleged adoption of the teachings of Muhammad through a reading of the Quran and associated documents has brought him into conflict with a traditional role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The Grand Mufti of Cyprus in 1996 declared that Charles was a Muslim, though it was denied by Buckingham Palace. Evidence for his close ties to Islam and role as a defender of that faith is to be found in numerous public statements made since the late 1980s, lectures in association with the Oxford University Centre for Islamic Studies, and personal appearances at mosques and throughout the Middle East. The 1960s Hippie "peace, love and compassion" dream of groups such as the political Left and individuals including Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, Prince of Wales, and as expressed in the latter's 1993 Islam and the West lecture at Oxford, disintegrated during the following decades as Islamic orthodoxies such as "jihad of the sword", global Intifada and the expansion of Islamic statehood under Sharia law took hold and clashed with Western technology in the form of weapons of mass destruction and Christian democratic values, all covertly driven by organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhod. His failure to condemn outright the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, and the killings and shootings which resulted from the publication of Danish and French cartoons in 2005 and 2015, instead putting the blame on individuals for the crime of "disrespecting" or "blaspheming" Muhammad, was seen as tantamount to supporting "jihad of the sword" as a fundamental element of Islamic ideology. The actions since the 1990s of Charles Mountbatten-Windsor in addressing Islam moves beyond merely encouraging the aforementioned inter-faith dialogue; it goes to the heart of a widely held perception in Great Britain that he is favouring Muslims over Anglicans / Islam over the Church of England. Such a perception, arising in part out of his pursuit of "soft-power" in seeking peace during recent conflicts between Islam and the West, threatens the very survival of the British monarchy.

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Introduction

Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, July 2025.

Is Charles III, King of England and the British Commonwealth, a Muslim, having submitted to the Islamic ideology as stated by the Grand Mufti of Cypress in 1996? Such a question would seem crazy, as he is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a role held by the British monarch since the 16th century. Yet evidence dating back to the 1980s points in the Islamic direction. For example, in a public lecture during 1993 he stated:

Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is poorer for having lost. At the heart of Islam is its preservation of an integral view of the Universe. Islam - like Buddhism and Hinduism - refuses to separate man and nature, religion and science, mind and matter, and has preserved a metaphysical and unified view of ourselves and the world around us. . . . But the West gradually lost this integrated vision of the world with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution. A comprehensive philosophy of nature is no longer part of our everyday beliefs (Mountbatten-Windsor 1993).

Such a defence was anything but common at the time, and met with a great deal of questioning, concern and criticism at the time in Great Britain, the Commonwealth and beyond.

It is telling that the two foci in the personal life of Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, outside of his role as British Monarch and now family head, is religious harmony through support for Islam, and the numerous threats to the environment, from micro to macro (global) level. These are reflected in the two books he has published to date: Harmony: A new way of looking at our world (2012) and Highgrove: A garden celebrated (2014). When the people of Great Britain and the Commonwealth looked for a stronger position from him in dealing with the issues of 2025, such as climate change and the disruptive impact of Islamic infiltration into Western societies, he was basically missing in action regarding the latter. Looking at Islam through the rose-coloured glasses of a young man coming to adulthood in London during the 1960s, explains a lot. However, three decades later, this portrayal of Islam as "Britain's salvation" immediately raised alarm bells and, in hindsight, has been proven wrong, resulting is a clear loss of social cohesion in places such as London and Birmingham. Even if he has not officially converted to Islam, there is no doubt that Prince Charles / King Charles III has long been an apologist for Islam and remains so to the present day. As such, he has been criticised accordingly. Much of this criticism, where it concerns his ties with Islam, is referenced below.

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Evidence

The following is a chronology of references to Prince Charles and King Charles III's interactions with, and support of, Islam.

1948

* 4 November: Charles Mountbatten-Windsor is born, son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

1960s

* late 1960s - Prince Charles begins to develop a deep interest in Islam whilst studying archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge University.

1976

* April: Queen Elizabeth II opens the Festival of Islam in London.

1980s

* 1980s - Prince Charles is introduced by author Laurens van de Post to French philosopher René Guénon and his concept of Traditionalism. Guénon had adopted Islamic Sufism in 1912. As recently noted:

Traditionalism castigates the soulless materialism and moral disorder of the modern world [aka the West] – blaming the Enlightenment for separating us from ‘the sacred’ – and looks to the religions of the East, and to Islam in particular, for an alternative. (Black 2025)

1988

* David Zerman, Victorian governor in row over international award, The Australian Jewish Times, 18 November 1988. Prince Charles was a member of the Templeton Prize committee which awarded £220,000 to Dr. Inamullah Khan, secretary-general of the controversial anti-Semitic and Pakistan-based World Muslim Congress, for services to religion. It is said to be like the Nobel Prize in the area of religion. The award was presented by Victorian governor Davis McCaughey.

1989

The Salman Rushdie affair

*14 February, St. Valentine's Day: Ayatollah Khomeini, head of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued the following fatwa:

I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses… and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly.

* Extract: In 1989, following the publication of The Satanic Verses, Prince Charles faced criticism for not publicly supporting Rushdie, reportedly believing the book insulted Muslims and stating he wouldn't support someone who insulted others' deeply held beliefs, leading to an argument with author Martin Amis and increased tensions during his Gulf tour, as per reports from the time and later accounts (Business Standard 2014).

* Extract: The future Charles III has made several strong public statements endorsing Islam as the solution to the spiritual and cultural ills of Britain and the West. His public advocacy of Islam appears to go back to 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an edict (fatwa) against Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses. Rather than defend Rushdie’s freedom of speech, Charles reacted to the death decree by reflecting on the positive features that Islam has to offer the spiritually empty lives of his countrymen (Gordon and Stillman 1997).

* Rawhi Abiedoh, Prince Charles withdraws from polo match amid Rushdie furor, RHI, 18 March 1989.

1990

1991

1992

1993

* 27 October: 'Islam and the West' - Speech by HRH The Prince of Wales, at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, on the occasion of his visit to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, 27 October 1993, duration: 42.14 minutes:

Islam and the West

Ladies and gentlemen, it was suggested to me when I first began to consider the subject of this lecture, that I should take comfort from the Arab proverb, 'In every head there is some wisdom'. I confess that I have few qualifications as a scholar to justify my presence here, in this theatre, where so many people much more learned than I have preached and generally advanced the sum of human knowledge. I might feel more prepared if I were an offspring of your distinguished University, rather than a product of that 'Technical College of the Fens' - though I hope you will bear in mind that a chair of Arabic was established in 17th century Cambridge a full four years before your first chair of Arabic at Oxford. Unlike many of you, I am not an expert on Islam - though I am delighted, for reasons which I hope will become clear, to be a Vice Patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. The Centre has the potential to be an important and exciting vehicle for promoting and improving understanding of the Islamic world in Britain, and one which I hope will earn its place alongside other centres of Islamic study in Oxford, like the Oriental Institute and the Middle East Centre, as an institution of which the University, and scholars more widely, will become justly proud.

Given all the reservations I have about venturing into a complex and controversial field, you may well ask why I am here in this marvellous Wren building talking to you on the subject of Islam and the West. The reason is, ladies and gentlemen, that I believe wholeheartedly that the links between these two worlds matter more today than ever before, because the degree of misunderstanding between the Islamic and Western worlds remains dangerously high, and because the need for the two to live and work together in our increasingly interdependent world has never been greater. At the same time I am only too well aware of the minefields which lie across the path of the inexpert traveller who is bent on exploring this difficult route. Some of what I shall say will undoubtedly provoke disagreement, criticism, misunderstanding and probably worse. But perhaps, when all is said and done, it is worth recalling another Arab proverb: 'What comes from the lips reaches the ears. What comes from the heart reaches the heart.'

The depressing fact is that, despite the advances in technology and mass communications of the second half of the 20th Century, despite mass travel, the intermingling of races, the ever growing reduction - or so we believe - of the mysteries of our world, misunderstandings between Islam and the West continue. Indeed, they may be growing. As far as the West is concerned, this cannot be because of ignorance. There are one billion Muslims worldwide. Many millions of them live in countries of the Commonwealth. Ten million or more live in the West, and around one million in Britain. Our own Islamic community has been growing and flourishing for decades. There are nearly 500 mosques in Britain. Popular interest in Islamic culture in Britain is growing fast. Many of you will recall - and I think some of you took part in - the wonderful Festival of Islam which Her Majesty The Queen opened in 1976. Islam is all around us. And yet distrust, even fear, persist. In the post-Cold War world of the 1990s, the prospects for peace should be greater than at any time in this century. In the Middle East, the remarkable and encouraging events of recent weeks have created new hope for an end to an issue which has divided the world and been so dramatic a source of violence and hatred. But the dangers have not disappeared. In the Muslim world, we are seeing the unique way of life of the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq, thousands of years old, being systematically devastated and destroyed. I confess that for a whole year I have wanted to find a suitable opportunity to express my despair and outrage at the unmentionable horrors being perpetrated in Southern Iraq. To me, the supreme and tragic irony of what has been happening to the Shia population of Iraq - especially in the ancient city and holy shrine of Kerbala - is that after the Western allies took immense care to avoid bombing such holy places (and I remember begging General Schwarzkopf when I met him in Riyadh in December 1990 to do his best to protect such shrines during any conflict) it was Saddam Hussein himself, and his terrifying regime, who caused the destruction of some of Islam's holiest sites. And now we have had to witness the deliberate draining of the marshes and the near total destruction of a unique habitat, together with an entire population that has depended upon it since the dawn of human civilization. The international community has been told the draining of the marshes is for agricultural purposes. How many more obscene lies do we have to be told before action is taken? Even at the eleventh hour it is still not too late to prevent a total cataclysm. I pray that this might at least be a cause in which Islam and the West could join forces for the sake of our common humanity. I have highlighted this particular example because it is so avoidable. Elsewhere, the violence and hatred are more intractable and deep-seated, as we go on seeing every day to our horror in the wretched suffering of peoples across the world - in the former Yugoslavia, in Somalia, Angola, Sudan, in so many of the former Soviet Republics. In Yugoslavia the terrible sufferings of the Bosnian Muslims, alongside that of other communities in that cruel war, help keep alive many of the fears and prejudices which our two worlds retain of each other. Conflict, of course, comes about because of the misuse of power and the clash of ideals, not to mention the inflammatory activities of unscrupulous and bigoted leaders. But it also arises, tragically, from an inability to understand, and from the powerful emotions which out of misunderstanding lead to distrust and fear. Ladies and gentlemen, we must not slide into a new era of danger and division because governments and peoples, communities and religions, cannot live together in peace in a shrinking world.

It is odd, in many ways, that misunderstandings between Islam and the West should persist. For that which binds our two worlds together is so much more powerful than that which divides us. Muslims, Christians - and Jews - are all 'peoples of the Book'. Islam and Christianity share a common monotheistic vision: a belief in one divine God, in the transience of our earthly life, in our accountability for our actions, and in the assurance of life to come. We share many key values in common: respect for knowledge, for justice, compassion towards the poor and underprivileged, the importance of family life, respect for parents. 'Honour thy father and thy mother' is a Quranic precept too. Our history has been closely bound up together. There, however, is one root of the problem. For much of that history has been one of conflict: fourteen centuries too often marked by mutual hostility. That has given rise to an enduring tradition of fear and distrust, because our two worlds have so often seen that past in contradictory ways. To Western school children, the two hundred years of Crusades are traditionally seen as a series of heroic, chivalrous exploits in which the kings, knights, princes - and children - of Europe tried to wrest Jerusalem from the wicked Muslim infidel. To Muslims, the Crusades were an episode of great cruelty and terrible plunder, of Western infidel soldiers of fortune and horrific atrocities, perhaps exemplified best by the massacres committed by the Crusaders when, in 1099, they took back Jerusalem, the third holiest city in Islam. For us in the West, 1492 speaks of human endeavour and new horizons, of Columbus and the discovery of the Americas. To Muslims, 1492 is a year of tragedy - the year Granada fell to Ferdinand and Isabella, signifying the end of eight centuries of Muslim civilisation in Europe. The point, I think, is not that one or other picture is more true, or has a monopoly of truth. It is that misunderstandings arise when we fail to appreciate how others look at the world, its history, and our respective roles in it.

The corollary of how we in the West see our history has so often been to regard Islam as a threat - in medieval times as a military conqueror, and in more modern times as a source of intolerance, extremism and terrorism. One can understand how the taking of Constantinople, when it fell to Sultan Mehmet in 1453, and the close-run defeats of the Turks outside Vienna in 1529 and 1683, should have sent shivers of fear through Europe's rulers. The history of the Balkans under Ottoman rule provided examples of cruelty which sank deep into Western feelings. But the threat has not been one way. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, followed by the invasions and conquests of the 19th century, the pendulum swung, and almost all the Arab world became occupied by the Western powers. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Europe's triumph over Islam seemed complete. Those days of conquest are over. But even now our common attitude to Islam suffers because the way we understand it has been hijacked by the extreme and the superficial. To many of us in the West, Islam is seen in terms of the tragic civil war in Lebanon, the killings and bombings perpetrated by extremist groups in the Middle East, and by what is commonly referred to as 'Islamic fundamentalism'. Our judgement of Islam has been grossly distorted by taking the extremes to be the norm. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a serious mistake. It is like judging the quality of life in Britain by the existence of murder and rape, child abuse and drug addition. The extremes exist, and they must be dealt with. But when used as a basis to judge a society, they lead to distortion and unfairness.

For example, people in this country frequently argue that the Sharia law of the Islamic world is cruel, barbaric and unjust. Our newspapers, above all, love to peddle those unthinking prejudices. The truth is, of course, different and always more complex. My own understanding is that extremes, like the cutting off of hands, are rarely practised. The guiding principle and spirit of Islamic law, taken straight from the Qur'an, should be those of equity and compassion. We need to study its actual application before we make judgements. We must distinguish between systems of justice administered with integrity, and systems of justice as we may see them practised which have been deformed for political reasons into something no longer Islamic. We must bear in mind the sharp debate taking place in the Islamic world itself about the extent of the universality or timelessness of Sharia law, and the degree to which the application of that law is continually changing and evolving.

We should also distinguish Islam from the customs of some Islamic states. Another obvious Western prejudice is to judge the position of women in Islamic society by the extreme cases. Yet Islam is not a monolith and the picture is not simple. Remember, if you will, that Islamic countries like Turkey, Egypt and Syria gave women the vote as early as Europe did its women - and much earlier than in Switzerland! In those countries women have long enjoyed equal pay, and the opportunity to play a full working role in their societies. The rights of Muslim women to property and inheritance, to some protection if divorced, and to the conducting of business, were rights prescribed by the Qur'an twelve hundred years ago, even if they were not everywhere translated into practice. In Britain at least, some of these rights were novel even to my grandmother's generation! Benazir Bhutto and Begum Khaleda Zia became prime ministers in their own traditional societies when Britain had for the first time ever in its history elected a female prime minister. That, I think, does not smack of a medieval society. Women are not automatically second-class citizens because they live in Islamic countries. We cannot judge the position of women in Islam aright if we take the most conservative Islamic states as representative of the whole. For example, the veiling of women is not at all universal across the Islamic world. Indeed, I was intrigued to learn that the custom of wearing the veil owed much to Byzantine and Sassanian traditions, nothing to the Prophet of Islam. Some Muslim women never adopted the veil, others have discarded it, others - particularly the younger generation - have more recently chosen to wear the veil or the headscarf as a personal statement of their Muslim identity. But we should not confuse the modesty of dress prescribed by the Qur'an for men as well as women with the outward forms of secular custom or social status which have their origins elsewhere.

We in the West need also to understand the Islamic world's view of us. There is nothing to be gained, and much harm to be done, by refusing to comprehend the extent to which many people in the Islamic world genuinely fear our own Western materialism and mass culture as a deadly challenge to their Islamic culture and way of life. Some of us may think the material trappings of Western society which we have exported to the Islamic world - television, fast-food, and the electronic gadgets of our everyday lifes - are a modernising, self-evidently good, influence. But we fall into the trap of dreadful arrogance if we confuse 'modernity' in other countries with their becoming more like us. The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims - and I do not just mean the extremists among them. We must understand that reaction, just as the West's attitude to some of the more rigorous aspects of Islamic life needs to be understood in the Islamic world. This, I believe, would help us understand what we have commonly come to see as the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. We need to be careful of that emotive label, 'fundamentalism', and distinguish, as Muslims do, between revivalists, who choose to take the practice of their religion most devoutly, and fanatics or extremists who use this devotion for political ends. Among the many religious, social and political causes of what we might more accurately call the Islamic revival is a powerful feeling of disenchantment, of the realisation that Western technology and material things are insufficient, and that a deeper meaning to life lies elsewhere in the essence of Islamic belief.

At the same time, we must not be tempted to believe that extremism is in some way the hallmark and essence of the Muslim. Extremism is no more the monopoly of Islam than it is the monopoly of other religions, including Christianity. The vast majority of Muslims, though personally pious, are moderate in their politics. Theirs is the 'religion of the middle way'. The Prophet himself always disliked and feared extremism. Perhaps the fear of Islamic revivalism which coloured the 1980's is now beginning to give way in the West to an understanding of the genuine spiritual forces behind this groundswell. But if we are to understand this important movement, we must learn to distinguish clearly between what the vast majority of Muslims believe and the terrible violence of a small minority among them which civilized people everywhere must condemn.

Ladies and gentlemen, if there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the straight jacket of history which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history. For example, we have underestimated the importance of 800 years of Islamic society and culture in Spain between the 8th and 15th centuries. The contribution of Muslim Spain to the preservation of classical learning during the Dark Ages, and to the first flowerings of the Renaissance, has long been recognised. But Islamic Spain was much more than a mere larder where Hellenistic knowledge was kept for later consumption by the emerging modern Western world. Not only did Muslim Spain gather and preserve the intellectual content of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, it also interpreted and expanded upon that civilisation, and made a vital contribution of its own in so many fields of human endeavour - in science, astronomy, mathematics, algebra (itself an Arabic word), law, history, medicine, pharmacology, optics, agriculture, architecture, theology, music. Averroes and Avenzoor, like their counterparts Avicenna and Rhazes in the East, contributed to the study and practice of medicine in ways from which Europe benefited for centuries afterwards.

Islam nurtured and preserved the quest for learning. In the words of the tradition, 'the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr'. Cordoba in the 10th century was by far the most civilised city of Europe. We know of lending libraries in Spain at the time King Alfred was making terrible blunders with the culinary arts in this country. It is said that the 400,000 volumes in its ruler's library amounted to more books than all the libraries of the rest of Europe put together. That was made possible because the Muslim world acquired from China the skill of making paper more than four hundred years before the rest of non-Muslim Europe. Many of the traits on which modern Europe prides itself came to it from Muslim Spain. Diplomacy, free trade, open borders, the techniques of academic research, of anthropology, etiquette, fashion, alternative medicine, hospitals, all came from this great city of cities. Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practice their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West. The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart.

More than this, Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is poorer for having lost. At the heart of Islam is its preservation of an integral view of the Universe. Islam - like Buddhism and Hinduism - refuses to separate man and nature, religion and science, mind and matter, and has preserved a metaphysical and unified view of ourselves and the world around us. At the core of Christianity there still lies an integral view of the sanctity of the world, and a clear sense of the trusteeship and responsibility given to us for our natural surroundings. In the words of that marvellous seventeenth century poet and hymn writer, George Herbert: 'A man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye, Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, and then the heaven espy.'

But the West gradually lost this integrated vision of the world with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution. A comprehensive philosophy of nature is no longer part of our everyday beliefs. I cannot help feeling that, if we could now only rediscover that earlier, all-embracing approach to the world around us, to see and understand its deeper meaning, we could begin to get away from the increasing tendency in the West to live on the surface of our surroundings, where we study our world in order to manipulate and dominate it, turning harmony and beauty into disequilibrium and chaos. It is a sad fact, I believe, that in so many ways the external world we have created in the last few hundred years has come to reflect our own divided and confused inner state. Western civilisation has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitive in defiance of our environmental responsibilities. This crucial sense of oneness and trusteeship of the vital sacramental and spiritual character of the world about us is surely something important we can relearn from Islam. I am quite sure some will instantly accuse me, as they usually do, of living in the past, of refusing to come to terms with reality and modern life. On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen, what I am appealing for is a wider, deeper, more careful understanding of our world: for a metaphysical as well as material dimension to our lives, in order to recover the balance we have abandoned, the absence of which, I believe, will prove disastrous in the long term. If the ways of thought in Islam and other religions can help us in that search, then there are things for us to learn in this system of belief which I suggest we ignore at our peril.

Ladies and gentlemen, we live today in one world, forged by instant communications, by television, by the exchange of information on a scale undreamed of by our grandparents. The world economy functions as an inter-dependent entity. Problems of society, the quality of life and the environment, are global in their causes and effects, and none of us any longer has the luxury of being able to solve them on our own. The Islamic and Western worlds share problems common to us all: how we adapt to change in our societies, how we help young people who feel alienated from their parents or society's values, how we deal with Aids, drugs, and the disintegration of the family. Of course, these problems vary in nature and intensity between societies. But the similarity of human experience is considerable. The international trade in hard drugs is one example, the damage we are collectively doing to our environment is another. We have to solve these threats to our communities and our lives together. Simply getting to know each other can achieve wonders. I remember vividly, for example, taking a group of Muslims and non-Muslims some years ago to see the work of the Marylebone Health Centre in London, of which I am patron. The enthusiasm and common determination that shared experience generated was immensely heart-warming. Ladies and gentleman, somehow we have to learn to understand each other, and to educate our children - a new generation - whose attitudes and cultural outlook may be different from ours so that they understand too. We have to show trust, mutual respect and tolerance, if we are to find the common ground between us and work together to find solutions. The community enterprise approach of my own Trust, and the very successful Volunteers Scheme it has run for some years, show how much can be achieved by a common effort which spans the classes, cultures and religions. The Islamic and Western world can no longer afford to stand apart from a common effort to solve their common problems. We cannot afford to revive the territorial and political confrontations of the past. We have to share experiences, to explain ourselves to each other, to understand and tolerate, and build on the positive principles our cultures have in common. That trade has to be two-way. Each of us needs to understand the importance of conciliation, of reflection - TADABBUR - to open our minds and unlock our hearts to each other. I am utterly convinced that the Islamic and Western worlds have much to learn from each other. Just as the oil engineer in the Gulf may be European, so the heart transplant surgeon in Britain may be Egyptian.

If this need for tolerance and exchange is true internationally, it applies with special force within Britain itself. Britain is a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. I have already mentioned the size of our own Muslim communities who live throughout Britain, both in large towns like Bradford and in tiny communities in places as remote as Stornaway in Western Scotland. These people, ladies and gentlemen, are an asset to Britain. They contribute to all parts of our economy - to industry, the public services, the professions and the private sector. We find them as teachers, doctors, engineers and scientists. They contribute to our economic well-being as a country, and add to the cultural richness of our nation. Of course, tolerance and understanding must be two-way. for those of us who are not Muslim, that may mean respect for the daily practice of the Islamic faith and a decent care to avoid actions which are likely to cause deep offence. For the Muslims in our society, there is a need to respect the history, culture and way of life of our country, and to balance their vital liberty to be themselves with an appreciation of the importance of integration in our society. Where there are failings of understanding and tolerance, we have a need, on our own doorstep, for greater reconciliation among our own citizens. I can only admire, and applaud, those men and women of so many denominations who work tirelessly, in London, South Wales, the Midlands and elsewhere, to promote good community relations. The Centre for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Birmingham is one especially notable and successful example. We should be grateful for the dedication and example of all those who have devoted themselves to the cause of promoting understanding.

Ladies and gentlemen, if, in the last half hour, your eyes have wandered up to the marvellous allegory of Truth descending on the arts and sciences in Sir Robert Streeter's ceiling above you, I am sure you will have noticed Ignorance being violently banished from the arena - just there in front of the organ casing. I feel some sympathy for Ignorance, and hope I may be able to vacate this theatre in somewhat better condition. Before I go, I cannot put to you strongly enough the importance of the issues which I have tried to touch on so imperfectly. These two worlds, the Islamic and the Western, are at something of a crossroads in their relations. We must not let them stand apart. I do not accept the argument that they are on a course to clash in a new era of antagonism. I am utterly convinced that our two worlds have much to offer each other. We have much to do together. I am delighted that the dialogue has begun, both in Britain and elsewhere. But we shall need to work harder to understand each other, to drain out any poison between us, and to lay the ghost of suspicion and fear. The further down that road we can travel, the better the world that we shall create for our children and for future generations.

* A common ground of the people of the book [Editorial], The Canberra Times, 31 October 1993.

A common ground of the people of the Book

Last week's call by the Prince of Wales for an end to hostility between the West and Islam contained within it much sense. The gulf between the two is increasing; it is one clear area where advances in technology and mass communications, where mass travel, the intermingling of races and far greater opportunities for people to see and to understand each other have, if any thing, considerably heightened, not lessened distrust. Yet, as Prince Charles pointed out, the peoples of the West and the people of Islam have very much in common in their culture. Christians, Jews and Muslims are all "people of the Book" with philosophical roots in the monotheism of the Semites: they share a common belief in the one God, in the transience of earthly life, in accountability for one's actions, and in the assurance of life to come. Many key values - respect for knowledge, justice, compassion, the importance of family life and respect for parents - come from common sources.

There is much conflict in the history of relations between the groups - in the Crusades, at Lepanto, even in the break-up of the, Ottoman Empire - but there is much in the same history of mutual tolerance, and. of groups learning from and respecting each other. It was from Arab civilisation and learning that Western Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and an intellectual flowering and sudden massive renaissance of learning and development occurred. As Prince Charles commented, "many of the traits on which Western Europe prides itself came to it from Muslim Spain - diplomacy, free trade, open borders, the techniques of academic research, of anthropology, etiquette, fashion, alternative medicine and hospitals. Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which has not, unfortunately, been copied for many centuries in the West ... Islam is a part of our past and present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe".

The mutual hostility and misunderstand ing continues to run deep. It has a number of roots going well beyond the centuries of conflict with Arab expansionism, which was, in many respects, a liberation for many (not least women) but which created great conflict at the borders. Modern European societieshave changed far more significantly in their conceptions of Church and State over the centuries than has Islam, though in, say the 14th century, there was no great difference. The secular nation state - whose development in Europe was itself in many respects a result of warrings between rival Christian groups - did not occur in anything like the same way, in some cases at all, in Islamic cultures, though it would be quite wrong to ascribe to Muslims either monolithic or unchanging beliefs about the relationships be tween man and the community; as in Western cultures there are different views in different regions, and they have changed over time. The modern Islamic nations, whether in the Arab states or in, say, Pakistan, Malaysia or Indonesia, 01 northern Africa, differ in their political and religious structures at least as much as do people of the West. Many Muslims genuinely fear and despise modern Western materialism and mass culture as a deadly challenge to their culture and way of life. As Prince Charles said, that reaction must be understood, just as the West's attitude to some of the more rigorous aspects of Islamic life have to be appreciated in the Islamic world. "This would help us under stand what we have commonly come to see as the threat of Islamic fundamentalism," he said. "We need to be careful of that emotive label and distinguish, as Muslims do, be tween revivalists, who choose to make the practice of their religion most devoutly, and fanatics t)r extremists who use this devotion for political ends. Among the many religious, social and political causes of what we might more accurately call the Muslim revival is a powerful feeling of disenchantment, of the realisation that Western technology and material things are insufficient, and that a deeper meaning to life lies elsewhere in the essence of Islamic belief."

That disenchantment with modern culture is not, of course, confined to Islam. Even among those who might share that alienation, however, there sometimes seems more things that divide than unite: an increasing gulf between notions of tolerance in the secular state and Islamic communities, misunderstanding or, in some cases, plain disagreement with Muslim attitudes or cultural practices of some Islamic groups, particularly in relation to women, but also embracing some attitudes to criminal justice. The deep suspicions of the West by Islam are more than matched by tendencies to ascribe monolithic views and practices to Muslims, and to imagine these are those of the most conservative Islamic communities.

Australia's most immediate northern neighbours are basically Islamic communities, and Australia itself has a small but growing Muslim population. Most Australians, however, are generally ignorant of Islam, and even if, in a fairly typical Australian fashion, there is a grudging tolerance to Muslims in our own community, it cannot be said that there is enough understanding and mutual respect It is time, as Prince Charles said, for some of the barriers to be broken down.

* Birthday a zesty time for Charles as Diana blues fade, The Canberra Times, 14 November 1993.

.... In October he denounced the "unmentionable horrors" of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime, asking how many more "obscene lies" the international community had to be told before taking action against Iraq. ... And during an official visit to Abu Dhabi this week he delighted the President of the United Arab Emirates, Zayid bin Sultan Al Nahayan, with his knowledge of Islam, prompting an immediate suggestion from the Arab leader to create an international forum for promoting mutual understanding between religions. .....

1994

* Charles will sever church-monarch ties, The Canberra Times, 27 June 1994.

Charles will sever church-monarch ties: report London: Britain's Prince Charles plans to end the monarch's role as head of the Church of England when he becomes king, the Sunday Times newspaper said. Prince Charles thinks the church should be disestablished because Britain is a multi-racial, multi-faith society in which the Church of England is a minority voice. "The Prince of Wales is planning to end the 450-year-old role of the monarch as head of the Church of England and defender of the faith," the newspaper said. It quoted the Prince during a television interview to be broadcast on Wednesday as saying, "I happen to believe that the Catholic subjects of the sovereign are as important |as Protestants|, not to mention the Islamic, Hindu and Zoroastrian". The Sunday Times said that although Prince Charles does not mention disestablishing the church in the interview, "it is clear he wishes to provoke a debate on the roles of church and monarchy. He also risks a rift with the Queen, who is firmly in favour of the status quo". Britain's monarch has been head of the Church of England since 1531 when Henry VIII broke ties with Rome. The interview by British journal ist Jonathan Dimbleby promises to offer a candid view of the Prince and is reported to touch on subjects such as his failed marriage to the Princess Diana and his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. In a separate report, The People newspaper claims Princcss Diana is planning a "revenge attack" with a television documentary prepared by Andrew Morton who wrote Diana: Her True Story. — Reuter.

* 29 June: Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role [documentary], ITV, London, 29 June 1994, duration: 150 minutes. YouTube. Therein Prince Charles declares his support for Islam and preference to be known as “Defender of Faith” (i.e. multiple faiths) rather than “Defender of the Faith” (i.e. the Church of England) leading to a rash of speculation that he favors the disestablishment of the Church of England (Kay & Craven 1997).

1995

1996

* The Grand Mufti of Cyprus, Nazim Al-Haqqani, stated the following in 1996, though this was immediately denied by Buckingham Palace:

Did you know that Prince Charles has converted to Islam? Yes, yes. He is a Muslim. I can't say more. But it happened in Turkey, Oh, yes, he converted all right. When you get home, check on how often he travels to Turkey. You'll find that your future king is a Muslim (Milton 1996).

* Sunday Times, 26 May 1996.

* Evening Standard, London, 15 October, 1996. Quote:

The idea of the Prince of Wales lugging around a prayer mat and turning to face Mecca five times a day sounds a tad unlikely - but, then again, so did confessing to adultery on prime-time television a couple of years ago. So perhaps no one should be shocked by the suggestion in a forthcoming book that Prince Charles has converted to Islam.

* 13 December: Prince Charles presents a notable speech at the Foreign Office Conference Centre at Wilton Park titled A sense of the sacred: building bridges between Islam and the West.

* Prince Charles, Islamic spirituality and the decline of the West, The Times, 14 December 1996. Extract from his speech at Wilton Park.

* Catherine Bennett, What on Earth is Prince Charles up To?, The Guardian, 18 December 1996.

* Patrick Sookhdeo, Prince Charles is Wrong: Islam Does Menace the West, The Daily Telegraph, 19 December 1996.

1997

* Prince Charles of Arabia, Middle East Quarterly, Fall 1997.

* Richard Kay and Nick Craven, Why Charles Is Driven to Build a Bridge to the East, Daily Mail, 6 January 1997.

* Richard Kay, Charles and the Wise Men of Islam, Daily Mail, 6 January 1997.

* Chaim Bermant, Islam is no cure for modern woes, The Australian Jewish Times, 17 January 1997.

Islam is no cure for modern woes

Chaim Bermant

Like Prince Charles, I am a great admirer of Islam. But, unlike His Royal Highness, I have a problem. If Islam is so admirable in theory, why are Islamic states so dreadful in practice? Prince Charles was careful, in his expression of praise, to add that he was talking of “Islamic civilisation at its best.” But where does one find it today? In the Sudan? Iraq? Syria? Afghanistan? Iran? Libya? Indonesia? The Yemen? Chechnya? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia?

There are over 50 Islamic states - more than 20 of which are members of the Arab League - comprising a population of almost a billion, and most are a byword for cruelty, incompetence and corruption. It was not always so. The Ummayad Caliphs of Damascus, the Abbasids of Baghdad, the Fatimids of Cairo, were all beacons of light at a time when Europe was steeped in darkness; and there was a marvellous flowering of Islamic culture under Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century, and under the Indian Moguls in the 17th, after which Islam sunk into almost inexorable decline. It has been enjoying something of a revival in our time but, as I have suggested, it has not made the world a happier place. The fact is, few religions, no matter how sublime their precepts, work out all that well in practice. One may think fondly of Christianity in decline, but it was often merciless while in power.

“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s” was fine as far as it went. But it did not go very far once Constantine converted to Christianity and started acting in the name of God. The first Crusade, which left a trail of Jewish blood across the face of Europe, and which culminated with the massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem - all in the name of the Prince of Peace - was a crime against humanity. The Fourth Crusade, against the Albigensian heretics, was another. The expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain was a third, and, until our own times, there was nothing to match the savagery with which Christian butchered Christian in the so-called “wars of religion” in the 17th century. Christianity became a moral force again only when it ceased to be a political one. When Stalin asked “how many divisions does the Pope have,” he misunderstood the whole situation. The power of the Pope lay precisely in the fact that he had none. Judaism, I’m afraid, is also one thing in theory and another in action. We tend to look back to the days of David and Solomon as the golden age in our history. It was certainly the most exciting age, but we acquired a moral influence out of all proportion to our number only after we ceased to be a political entity.

The governing precept of Jewish life as defined by Zechariah - “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit sayeth the Lord of Hosts” - dates from the beginning of our dispersion. Judaism is essentially wholesome and benign as long as it is distant from power. In Israel, where it exercises considerable power, it is neither the one nor the other. Those who claim to speak in its name are often indifferent to the rights of the Arab, and hostile to the secular Jew - or to Jews who do not embrace their brand of Judaism. They also have a primitive idea of justice, a limited concept of ethics, no interest in other cultures, and if - heaven forbid - they should ever become an actual majority and attain real power, Israel would become as backward and barbaric as Christendom was, and Islamic states are.

But to return to Prince Charles. He is sickened, as any reasonable person might be, by many aspects of contemporary life - the mindless search for instant gratification, the indifference to tradition, the decline of authority, the absence of discipline or restraint, the rampant materialism - and he evoked the spiritual claims of Islam in order to temper the excesses of secularism. He was right in his diagnosis, but wrong in his remedy. Islam is indeed rich in qualities which we could all emulate, but it can also display an assertiveness, aggression and intolerance which are alien to the Western character and, if a country like Britain should need guidelines to find its way back to a more wholesome way of life, they are to be found in its own Judaeo-Christian traditions. One final thought. Adultery is a capital offence in many Islamic countries and one daren’t think what fate might have befallen His Royal Highness had he lived in, say, Saudi Arabia.

* Islam on the Rise, Spearhead, London, January 1997. Extract:

..... Shortly before Christmas, most national newspapers carried reports of the incident in Birmingham’s Washwood Heath Secondary School, when an Asian teacher disrupted a carol service because the choir included members of the school’s Muslim majority. As the choir sang Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, the 27-year-old father-of-two, Israr Khan, leapt to his feet shouting “Why are you saying Jesus and Jesus Christ. God is not your God, it is Allah.” Turning to the audience, he yelled: “Who is your God?”, to which many Asian pupils — who make up 60 percent of the 1,265-strong school roll — replied with chants of “Allah” and enthusiastic applause. “The audience was booing and shouting at us,” said one shocked choir member. According to the Daily Telegraph of 19th December, “Staff are said to go out of their way to celebrate major religious festivals recognized by its pupils, including the Muslim Ramadan and Hindu Diwali as well as Christmas.” Clearly such equal treatment is no longer enough for many Muslims, who are beginning to exercise their growing power and influence on councils and schools in many British towns and cities. What was most interesting about this incident was not the sensationalist condemnations of Islamic intolerance, and naive calls for “inter-faith understanding and tolerance’, which appeared in the tabloids. Far more significant was an article in the Daily Telegraph of 19th December by Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, the Director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity.

Under the headline: “Prince Charles is wrong: Islam does menace the West” the article warned gravely that the Muslims, who “want to move into the mainstream of British life . . . may seek to change the existing political, legal and educational structures to conform to Islamic norms.” Warned Dr. Sookhdeo:

Many British Muslims - particularly victims of racial discrimination and economic marginalization within Britain’s affluent society - feel, first members of the world-wide Muslim community and only secondly members of British society . . . A preacher in a European mosque recently reminded his congregation that it was the migration of a Syrian Muslim to Spain which resulted in Spain’s Islamic civilisation and Islamic rule. He challenged his listeners, who had all migrated to Europe, to consider for what purpose Allah had brought them to Europe.

* John Casey, Friend of Islam Given a Hero’s Welcome, The Daily Telegraph, 8 March 1997. The Charles of Arabia phenomena is cited by a journalist and the Foreign Office as assisting in financial dealings with Muslim countries.

* Richard Wollffe and Simon Targett, $33m gift to Oxford Islamic centre, Financial Times, 30 May 1997.

* Gordon Conway, Islamophobia: A challenge for us all, The Runnymede Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, The Runnymede Trust, London, 1997, 75p. Refers to Prince Charles.

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

* Richard Allan Greene, British Jews angry over Assad visit, The Australian Jewish News, 20 December 2002. Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth meet with President Bashar Assad of Syria.

2003

2004

2005

* 14 July (MIM): And what does the good prince have to say about the murder by Islamists of 55 in London a week ago? He put fingers to keyboard and produced "True Muslims Must Root Out The Extremists" for the Mirror:

.....some deeply evil influence has been brought to bear on these impressionable young minds. … Some may think this cause is Islam. It is anything but. It is a perversion of traditional Islam. As I understand it, Islam preaches humanity, tolerance and a sense of community. … these acts have nothing to do with any true faith. … it is vital that everyone resists the temptation to condemn the Muslim community for the actions of such a tiny and evil minority. If we succumb to that temptation, the bombers will have achieved their aim. Likewise, in my view, it is the duty of every true Muslim to condemn these atrocities and root out those among them who preach and practice such hatred and bitterness.

Comment: This sounds to me like the same apologetics churned out by the Muslim Council of Britain and other Islamist bodies.

* 4 September 2005 (MIM): Prince Charles revealed in a letter leaked to the Daily Telegraph that he had strained relations with George Carey, then archbishop of Canterbury, over his attitude toward Islam. Particularly contentious was his expressed intent, on becoming king and supreme governor of the Church of England, to ditch the centuries' old defender of the faith title and replace it with defender of faith and defender of the Divine. The letter reveals the archbishop's reaction.

I wish you'd been there for the archbishop! Didn't really appreciate what I was getting at by talking about "the Divine" and felt that I had said far more about Islam than I did about Christianity - and was therefore worried about my development as a Christian.

According to royal aides, Charles did not much respect Lord Carey's views and the feelings were reciprocated.

* 29 October 2005 (MIM): "Prince Charles to plead Islam's cause to Bush" reads the Sunday Telegraph headline. The text by Andrew Alderson tells how the Prince of Wales:

.....will try to persuade George W. Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11. The Prince, who leaves on Tuesday for an eight-day tour of the US, has voiced private concerns over America's "confrontational" approach to Muslim countries and its failure to appreciate Islam's strengths.

Apparently, he "wants Americans - including Mr Bush - to share his fondness for Islam."

* Sheik Charles of England ? More evidence of his Muslim conversion as Prince comes to US to teach Americans about Islam, Militant Islam Monitor.org, 1 November 2005.

2006

* During a visit to al-Aazhar University in Egypt's Cairo in 2006, the Prince of Wales criticized the publication in 2005 of Danish cartoons which mocked the prophet Muhammad. The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy resulted in worldwide protests and more that 250 deaths.

2007

2008

2009

* 8 December: Prince Charles speaks at a dinner celebrating the 25th anniversary of Islamic Relief UK:

“Whoever saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of all mankind.”

Dr. Hany el Banna, Ladies and Gentlemen, Can I just begin by saying what a great privilege and, more importantly perhaps, what a great pleasure it is to have been invited to join you all here this evening. I cannot tell you how fascinated I have been by the personal anecdotes I have been hearing from so many of Islamic Relief’s supporters over the past hour or so. Each of these stories speaks volumes about Islamic Relief’s outstanding work in providing humanitarian aid to literally millions of the most vulnerable people over the past quarter of a century. I hesitate to single out any one story… But, if I may say so, I did just want to mention how pleased I was to hear about Islamic Relief’s very first donor Dr. Bassem Hassan who, at the age of only fifteen, donated twenty pence of his savings. With that simple but noble act, Dr. Hassan initiated twenty-five years of generous giving.

Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I cannot quite claim a twenty-five year association with Islamic Relief. But I can say that I have followed your remarkable achievements with the closest interest during much of that period, including visiting your offices in Park Road. It is in the midst of humanitarian crises that we see your work at its most compelling – and its most difficult. Three years ago, and after nearly sixty years of delay, my wife and I had the great joy of visiting Pakistan, exactly one year after that devastating earthquake that claimed the lives of so many and caused so much destruction and disruption. Visiting Pattika, we were able to see for ourselves the terrible aftermath and, at Gundi Pira Girls Secondary School, could not have been more impressed by the way in which Islamic Relief was ensuring that life returned to normal as quickly as possible by providing tents in which classes could take place while the classrooms themselves rose again within that shattered community.

This, of course, is just one example of the crucial assistance you bring to communities from among the staggering three million whom your relief work reached last year alone. While it is disaster relief which may stick most readily and most clearly in our minds, we must not overlook Islamic Relief’s equally important commitment to the wider development agenda with, for example, programmes that include drug-users overcoming their addiction in Afghanistan and support to female victims of domestic violence in Iraq.

Nor, indeed, must we forget the outstanding way in which Islamic Relief works as part of a network of international N.G.O.’s, including the United Nations, the British Red Cross (of which I am enormously proud to be President), Christian Aid and C.A.F.O.D., to name but a few. In this work, you are not merely crossing the boundaries of faith and community but, in fact, building durable bridges between different groups. I know that only last year, for example, Islamic Relief united with Christian Aid and World Jewish Relief in Cambridge to discuss how British faith-based communities could collaborate to tackle poverty. It is hard to overstate the importance of such contacts. As long ago as 1993, in a speech entitled “Islam and the West” which I gave at that other great seat of learning, Oxford University, I recall observing that: “the links between these two worlds matter more today than ever before, because the degree of misunderstanding between the Islamic and Western worlds remains dangerously high, and because the need for the two to live together in our increasingly interdependent world has never been greater”. I can only salute those who work so tirelessly to build such bridges.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Islamic Relief’s fine achievements bear witness to the energy, dynamism and selflessness of our British Muslim community. We hear rather too much misleading information about a small minority of your community and not nearly enough about the vastly more numerous acts of compassion and commitment which characterize the work of Islamic Relief and its supporters. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is why I was so happy and proud to come here this evening, to celebrate these achievements with you… And it is why, in 2008, I was so delighted when Islamic Relief received the annual International Award from “Mosaic” – an organization I founded a little over two years ago to provide mentoring for younger, disadvantaged members of our Muslim community and which has now reached a remarkable 10,000 young people. I can only say how delighted I would be if we could find further synergies with the work of my Prince’s Charities and look forward to discussing this further with Mr. Saleh Saeed and others…

I, for one, am acutely conscious that none of Islamic Relief’s achievements would have been possible without the vision, passion, and sheer dedication of a truly extraordinary and remarkable man, Dr. Hany El Banna. Dr. Hany, having witnessed at first hand the devastating humanitarian situation in the Horn of Africa in 1984, continues to deploy his unique ability to mobilize people, ensuring that the singular importance of humanitarian work remains high on the agenda of world leaders twenty-five years on… I can only offer my boundless and most heartfelt admiration for all Dr. Hany’s work.

Ladies and Gentlemen, in closing, and recognizing that we have recently celebrated the festival of Eid, let me recall – if I may – a passage from the Holy Qu’ran which seems particularly appropriate to Islamic Relief’s work and which says, in verse thirty-two of Al Ma’idah Surah: “Whoever saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of all mankind.”

Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen, for saving and transforming so many lives over the past 25 years and may there be many blessings in shallah on your work during the next quarter of a century.

HRH Prince Charles Gala Relief Dinner, Islamic Relief Worldwide, 13 January 2010, YouTube, duration: minutes.

2010

* Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, Harmony: A new way of looking at our world, Harper Perennial, 2012, 329p.

* 11 June: Islam and the Environment, Institute of Islamic Studies Oxford University, YouTube, 11 June 2010, duration: 63.57 minutes.

2011

* Martin Amis blasts the royal family, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 2011.

2012

* late 2012 - early 2013: Prince Charles takes lessons in Arabic in order to study the Koran and other Islamic teachings.

2013

* Douglas Murray, Islamophilia: A very metropolitan malady, The Author, 2013, 64p.

* March: Prince Charles, whilst in Qatar, expresses his interest in learning Arabic.

* 14 March: Ben Brumfeld, Prince Charles: Arabic is tough to learn, CNN, 13 March 2013.

Qatar's Sheikh Abdul Rahman Bin Saud Al Thani escorts Prince Charles and his wife Camilla in Doha.

* Tribute to Chief Rabbi Johnathan Sacks | HRH The Prince of Wales, The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, 5 July 2013, YouTube, duration: 13.29 minutes. Baron Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogues of Great Britain the Commonwealth.

2014

* Prince Charles did not support Rushdie over Satanic Verses, Business Standard, 15 April 2014.

* Paul Elie, A Fundamental Fight, Vanity Fair, New York, 29 April 2014.

* 4 November - Prince Charles presents a statement calling for Muslims to warn of anti-Christian persecution.

* Speech of Prince Charles - Message to Islam, From Car to Calling, 5 November 2014, YouTube, duration: 1.00 minutes.

2015

* 7 January: The Charlie Hebdo cartoon office shooting in Paris, France, resulted in the killing of 12 staff members and injuring of 11. It was carried out al-Qaeda Muslims. This followed previous incidents in 2011 and 2012 over the publication of cartoons featuring Muhammad. Charles apparently made no comment on the Charlie Hebdo murders.

* Catherine Mayer, Charles: The Heart of a King, W.H. Allen, London, 5 February 2015, 448p. Official biography.

* Shelana Janmohamed, Prince Charles: An unlikely but welcome cheerleader, for Muslim women, The Telegraph, London, 5 February 2015. He opposes burqa and niqab bans.

2016

* Millar, Angel, Islam and Prince Charles, Quest, 104.2, Spring 2016, 64-67.

2017

2018

2019

2020

* Prince Charles visits the Palestinian territories.

2021

* November: Prince Charles visits Egypt.

Charles attends a reception at Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo in November 2021. (Reuters)

2022

* The truth about Bin Laden's family donation to Prince Charles, Nicki Swift, 1 August 2022, YouTube, duration: 5.30 minutes. See also Times Radio, 9.20 minutes.

* Prince Charles denies receiving donation from Bin Laden family, UN TV News and Rescue, 2 August 2022, YouTube, duration: 1.36 minutes.

* 15 August: Will Lloyd, How we gave up on Salman Rushdie, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, 15 August 2022.

* 8 September: King Charles III takes the throne.

* Abukar Arman, Politics propelling conversion of King Charles III, Foreign Policy Association, 12 September 2022. Text:

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the United Kingdom now has its first King since George VI more than seven decades ago. Saturday September 10, 2022 is recorded in history as the day Prince Charles was proclaimed as King Charles III. Aside from the challenge of having to (ceremonially) lead a country that is undergoing political and economic turmoil with a Prime Minister - Liz Truss - who has less than a week of experience in her top executive position, the new king comes with a mixed bag of goodwill and controversy. An international media and tabloid feeding frenzy is already underway. In his previous role as The Prince of Wales and a monarch of wide international fame, the new King is accused of using his influences to advance UK’s weapons industry deals with his personal friends. He has held dozens of meetings with rulers of repressive regimes in the Middle East since the Arab Spring in 2011. He has “played a key role in promoting £14.5-billion worth of UK arms exports to these regimes.” According to UK Declassified, there is no question that he was a royalty-level salesman for UK arms makers during said period.

The ‘Barack Hussein’ Effect

At the heart of the controversy surrounding the new King is his stance on Islam and Muslims. His affinity with Islam and vision to improve the relationship between the Western and the Islamic world extend for decades. In his speech Islam and the West that was delivered at Oxford in 1993, he said:

“I believe wholeheartedly that the links between these two worlds matter more today than ever before, because the degree of misunderstanding between the Islamic and Western worlds remains dangerously high, and because the need for the two to live and work together in our increasingly interdependent world has never been greater.”

In his previous role, the new King has also taken positions that opposed UK foreign policy. The most notables are: His opposition to the Iraq war and the neocon foreign policy adventures; his disagreement with the notion that those cartoonists who flagrantly offended Prophet Muhammad were merely exercising the democratic value of freedom of expression. Also, his disagreement with the burqa and hijab ban in Europe. Moreover, the new King is sympathetic to the Palestinian people’s right to an independent state. Granted, as a King, his leadership is ceremonial and his political views must be shelved in his royal bedroom closet, but that will not be enough to tame the usual suspects—Islamophobes and Zionists of all shades—who are determined to ferociously come after the new King to make him an unpopular King by accusing him of being a Muslim in disguise.

In his previous role, the new King has offended some when it became public that he learned Arabic, studies the Quran, and believes that “Christianity can learn from Islam.” Unlike most of the Western leaders, he had no problem offering a counter-narrative to Islamophobia. He refused to accept the so-called clash of civilization thesis popularized by the neocons. “I do not accept the argument that they (the Western and Islamic cultures) are on a course to clash in a new era of antagonism. I am utterly convinced that our two worlds have much to offer each other. We have much to do together. I am delighted that the dialogue has begun, both in Britain and elsewhere.” And in a speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia 2006, he said: “We need to recover the depth, the subtlety, the generosity of imagination, the respect for wisdom that so marked Islam in its great ages …” These sympathetic public statements at an era of glorified jingoism and ruthless Islamophobia made then Prince Charles a target. In 2003, two months before President George W. Bush appointed him to sit on the board of United states Institute for Peace, the notorious Islamophobe Daniel Pipes has published a long dossier to implicate Prince Charles as a Muslim in disguise.

King Charles III is set to become UK’s Barack Hussein Obama, at least in being projected as an alien leader. Each, on his own, has undergone an up close and personal experience that inspired him to form his own perspective and narrative on Islam and Muslims. And their respective narratives, needless to say, flies in the face of the traditional aristocrats, the political elite, and the ideologically-driven media. To bulwark against political demonization, the new King may have to dominate the headlines by taking the moral stance that his late mother—Queen Elizabeth II—failed to take: offer an official apology to all of the countries that suffered exploitation and oppression under the British colonial enterprise. His first step should be that which could be his legacy. Meanwhile, in a country that virtually drifted away from its religious identity: ‘So what if he is a Muslim?’

* Robert Johnson, Charles at Seventy: Thoughts, Hopes and Dreams, John Blake Publishing Ltd., 13 September 2022, 370p.

* 16 September: King Charles III's views on Islam, Al Hakham Weekly, 16 September 2022.

* 20 September: King Charles III's attraction to Islam, Blogging Theology, 20 September 2022, YouTube, duration: 12.36 minutes.

2023

* 7 October 2023 - Hamas et al. invade Israel, with horrendous results. Prince Charles condemns them.

* King Charles condemns 'barbaric acts of terrorism in Israel', GBNews, 12 October 2023, YouTube, duration: 3.51 minutes.

* Camilla Tominey, Israel-Hamas conflict: 'King Charles uses soft power to broker peace' | Royal Insight, The Telegraph, London, 19 October 2023, YouTube, duration: 7.57 minutes.

* King Charles III: Mutual understanding between religions violent during Israel-Hamas war, TalkTV, 20 October 2023, YouTube, duration: 9.09 minutes.

2024

2025

* 18 February: King Charles wishes Muslims "Ramadan Mubarak" but ignores the start of the Christian period of Lent.

* 26 February: King Charles packs dates for Ramadan at London's Darjeeling Express restaurant.

* 3 March: Celebration of Iftar at Windsor Castle. The ending of a day of fast during Ramadan.

* 7 March: Has the King converted?, Landeur, 7 March 2025, YouTube, duration: 13.32 minutes.

* 9 March: King Charles' 'belief' in multiculturalism is 'an existential threat to the future of the monarchy', GBNews, YouTube, duration: 11.19 minutes.

* 9 March: King Charles pandered to Muslim community 'above all others', Sky News Australia, 9 March 2025, YouTube, duration: 3.14 minutes.

* "Did he have to write this?" - King Charles praises Islam during Easter speech, TalkTV, 20 April 2025, YouTube, duration: 6.10 minutes.

* ‘Luxury he can’t afford’: Douglas Murray slams King Charles’ political move on climate , Sky News Australia, 16 July 2025, YouTube, duration: 3.08 minutes.

* Tim Black, The Islamophilia of King Charles, Spiked, 22 July 2025.

Text: Among those attending the 40th anniversary bash for the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, one guest stood out – King Charles III. The presence of the UK’s sovereign at an Islamic studies institute was hardly a surprise, however. And not just because he is the centre's patron. Charles, it is fair to say, is an unabashed Islamophile. He may have claimed some three decades ago that, as king, he intended to be the defender of faith – rather than the defender of the faith as his official role has it – but there is definitely one faith that he prefers above all others. And it’s not that of the Church of England.

Charles’s near Orientalist fascination with Islam is not a new story. There were even rumours in the mid-1990s, circulated by the grand mufti of Cyprus no less, that the then prince had secretly converted to Islam during a trip to Turkey (which beats getting your teeth done). The palace promptly dismissed the rumours as ‘nonsense’, but their very existence was a testament to the extent to which Charles was cleaving ever closer to Islam. This Islamic turn has always been entwined with Charles’s deep-seated animosity towards Western modernity. Towards its immense social and technological gains – from greater freedom to science’s growing mastery of nature. As the head of a pre-modern institution, grounded in the antiquated notion of the divine right to rule, Charles’s animosity to modernity is not exactly a shock. But what has always separated Charles from his tight-lipped, public-service-oriented predecessors has been the extent to which he has publicly endorsed reactionary ideas about how the world should be organised. There has been his long-standing, plant-whispering embrace of all species of greenism. And, intertwined with his fervent environmentalism, there is his embrace of Islam.

The seeds were likely sown while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the mid-to-late 1960s. Studying archaeology and anthropology, he found himself drawn to non-Western cultures as alternatives to Western modernity. His ideas really took root during the 1980s, when South African author Laurens van der Post introduced him to an obscure school of philosophy known as Traditionalism. This pushed all of Charles’s reactionary buttons. Pioneered by a little-known French philosopher called René Guénon, Traditionalism castigates the soulless materialism and moral disorder of the modern world – blaming the Enlightenment for separating us from ‘the sacred’ – and looks to the religions of the East, and to Islam in particular, for an alternative. Charles’s basic position echoes that of Guénon. Indeed, when the future king addressed the Traditionalist ‘Sacred Web’ conference in 2006, he praised Guénon’s ‘critique of the false premises of modernity’, and argued that humanity had been ‘uprooted’ by social and material progress, and was now leading itself through ‘our ignorance and arrogance… towards catastrophe’. Like Guénon, Charles has consistently drawn on Islam to attack Western society. He did so most famously in his 1993 lecture, ‘Islam and the West‘, delivered at the very same Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies he attended last week. Charles spoke of understanding why Muslim societies reject ‘materialism’ and ‘consumerism’. He said that while we may think that ‘television, fast-food and the electronic gadgets of our everyday lives… are a modernising, self-evidently good, influence… The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims – and I do not just mean the extremists among them.’ Charles was not making a case for mere cultural relativism, different strokes for different folks. He was actively championing the Islamic worldview as superior to that of the post-Enlightenment West. It ‘can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost’, he said. ‘Western civilisation has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitative in defiance of our environmental responsibilities’, he continued, before claiming that ‘we can relearn from Islam’ a ‘wider, deeper, more careful understanding of our world’.

Time and again over the past few decades, Charles has returned to this theme, pitching Islam as a corrective to the modern world. In a 1996 speech, subtitled ‘Building Bridges Between Islam and the West’, he said that Islam could ‘help us in the West to rethink, and for the better, our practical stewardship of man and his environment’. And in another speech delivered at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, this time in 2010, he said Islam possesses ‘one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity’. This, he said, had been obscured by a drive towards ‘Western materialism’. For Charles, then, secular, materialistic Western society is the problem and Islam is the solution. While Charles has wielded Islam as a cudgel to attack the inhabitants of the modern West – for being too free, for refusing to bow down before ‘sacred’ nature and no doubt before the king, too – he has also defended Islamic societies from criticism. In his 1993 lecture, he described objections to Islamic societies’ sometimes less-than-liberal attitudes towards women as a ‘Western prejudice’. More strikingly, he has consistently minimised the threat of Islamism. In the same 1993 lecture, he claimed that the Western public’s fear of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ was little more than bigotry – a bigotry born of conflating isolated examples of violent Islamic extremism with a broader religious ‘revivalism’, fuelled by ‘the realisation that Western technology and material things are insufficient, and that a deeper meaning to life lies elsewhere in the essence of Islamic belief’.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that Charles seems to also think that Islam should be beyond criticism – and that those who mock, ridicule or raise objections against it deserve what’s coming to them. In 2006, after the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked worldwide riots leading to at least 200 deaths, Charles defended the rioters. ‘The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others’, he told an audience at Al Azhar University in Egypt. According to author Martin Amis in 2014, Charles even refused to defend his own subject, Salman Rushdie, after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him in 1989, following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Amis told Vanity Fair that Charles said he would not offer support ‘if someone insults someone else’s deepest convictions’. Quite the opposite, it seems. In 2003, at the Islamic Foundation in Leicestershire, Charles met up with someone called Chowdhury Mueen Uddin. Uddin, a member of Jamaat-e-Islami, had played a key role in organising the protests in Britain against Rushdie. All this goes some way to explaining Charles’s fairly evasive official statement on the 20th anniversary of the London 7/7 bombings. Steadfastly omitting any reference to the Islamist motivation of the terrorists, he claimed the attacks showed the importance of ‘building a society where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live together with mutual respect and understanding’. Listening to Charles, one could be forgiven for thinking it was our fault – our lack of ‘mutual respect’ and understanding – that four young jihadists decided to detonate explosives on Tube trains and a bus.

This, then, is Britain’s king. A figure whose deep rejection of the social, political and material gains of modernity has apparently driven him towards Islam – or at least his Traditionalist-inflected version of it. So immersed is he in his reactionary, religious dreams that he now struggles to recognise the threat of Islamist terror even when it is literally exploding on our streets. The Islamophilia of King Charles is fast becoming all of our problem.

* Britain's first Islamic king? King Charles and the fall of Jewish safety in the UK, MorningShot, 23 July 2025, YouTube, duration: 12.28 minutes.

* 7 October: King Charles' secret belief about Islam finally revealed: Joe Rogan Podcast, Path to Power, 7 October 2025, YouTube, duration: 9.36 minutes. This is not Joe Rogan. It is an AI impersonation of his voice, presenting a positive spin on Charles' relationship with Islam. The author is not identified.

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3. Comments

Charles Mountbatten-Windsor has, during his life, faced many important issues, both a an individual and a member of the royal family of Great Britain. Reaching adulthood during the 1960s, he emerged from that with a Leftist / Hippie view of the world, centred around the tenets of peace, love and compassion. Like many young people at the time - including this writer who was born 8 years later than Charles - he came to be critical of Western Civilization as a concept, and as a result look to the East for an alternative. This bought not - like many others - to Buddhism, but to Islam and the teachings of Muhammad from 622AD onwards. This was unfortunate, for at its dark heart Islam seeks world domination through the imposition of Islamic caliphates and Sharia law; and death to all those who are not strict Muslim adherents to the Islamic ideology, often achieved through the process of "jihad of the sword" and abeyance of the word of God as received by Muhammad and recorded in the Quran. Charles has largely ignored the dark elements of Islam in his proselytizing, though he does make occasional references to "radial" elements, whilst failing to accept the reality of fourteen centuries in which such elements of Islam have been part of the orthodoxy, though ignored by a large section of followers. And that is the problem, for Charles and large sections of Western society, especially those from the Left. In covertly spreading its tentacle around the world through groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Islam has slowly infiltrated Christian and other non-Islamic societies, successfully seeking to convert and control. Some eighty countries have fallen. Charles' dream of unification between Islam and the West has not eventuate. In fact, the divided has widened since he spoke at Oxford University back in 1993, and been worse since the events of 9/11. Of course the West is not innocent in this, and is rightly subject to much criticism. However, for many in the West Islam has long been a mystery - meaningfully so on the part of Muslims - and is only now (circa 2025) being revealed - often for a second time - in places such as Europe, Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia.

We can look with some sympathy on Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, especially for his early conversion to Islam, and whether he "submitted to it" and became a Muslim or not. But we cannot condone his continued denial of its truth, and the truth set in place by Muhammad between 622-632AD and clearly laid out in the Quran. For that truth is dark and should long ago been abandoned by Muslims, just as in many other religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, inappropriate ideologies and actions have been abandoned. As ir currently states, the basic ideology of Islam is inconsistent with that of the open, free societies of Western democracies. Charles may be critical of the West, but the message of Jesus Christ and Buddha - i.e. pursue peace, love and compassion - is clearly at odds with those of Muhammad and the Quran. The loving God of Christians is not the fearful God / Allah of Muhammad.

Great Britain at the end of 2025 is a mess. It is in social turmoil due to the influx of large numbers of Muslims over the decades since the 1990s; the imposition of Sharia law in part within Britain; and basic social attitudes of many Muslims which are at odds with those of traditional British, Christian-based open democratic principles; and the many areas of Islam that are at odds with traditional British values, such as mysogeny, paedophilia, free speech, human rights, religious freedom and non-violence. The fact is, if Charles were to openly address these issues he would face a great deal of pushback from the Islamic world. As he is obviously not prepared to do that, or does not see reality in that way, he will continue to suffer the criticisms as revealed above.

Charles' pleas for understanding and respect in regard to Islam and Muhammad, along with those in the West which treat Islam as a religion beyond any criticism is nothing less than censorship. Free speech, and critical thinking are key to the democratic process and open, free societies. To allow Islam to hide the more controversial aspects of its basic teachings, and to act covertly in its dealings with society, goes against the basic rights of human beings and the core elements of Western society. It is for these reasons that there may never be any real solution to the problem of Islam for the West, at least while ever jihad, mysogeny, paedophilia, and discrimination along lines of religious belief, sex, race and politics are core elements. Statements such as the following by Islamic apologists such as King Charles III are also evidence of this inevitable impasse:

If there is much understanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the straight jacket of history which we have inherited.

This statement is full of historical facts turned into platitudes and excuses. The referral to misunderstanding is present amongst all societies and cultures, as they focus on their own well-being and survival. We do not need to know what other cultures and societies are doing, unless they interfere with our own. Of course it is good to be knowledgeable about such things, but not necessary. Secondly, of course with regard to ...the nature of Islam there is also much ignorance. So what? Is that a problem for the West? Do we really need to know about, and respect, jihad? As regards ...the debt our own culture and civilization owe to the Islamic world - of course that is of interest, but apart from being recognised historically in curricula and by those interested in such things, nothing is really owed. And what about the debt the non-Western world owes to the West, or the Asian world is due for their activity over the millenia? Does that need to be recognised and honoured in some way, as Charles seems to suggest? And finally, his straight-jacket of history is, I am sorry to say, a universal garment, worn by historians since time immemorial. Could I suggest that the picture of history that Charles is constructing in regard to Islam is placing a straight-jacket over the rest of the world, as it is a sanitized version of history and of the present, aimed at placating and "maintaining the peace" whilst Islam meanders along covertly and often out of sight with dreams of world conquest, global Intifada (rebellion or uprising against the West) and Sharia law over all races.

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4. References

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Last updated: 5 January 2026

Michael Organ, Australia

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