Should Prince Charles be barred from the monarchy on religious grounds?
An article at
Jihad Watch suggests that Prince Charle’s continuing “admiration of Islam and defamation of his own culture” (quoting a 1997 article in Middle East Quarterly), and his possible secret conversion to Islam that such behavior points to, disqualifies him from being king.
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Ken Hechtman, a Canadian leftist who reads VFR, writes:
You can do better than this.
“Possible secret conversion”? This is the way people talk when they’ve got nothing and they know it. I could write a libel-proof headline about Lawrence Auster’s “possible secret conversion” to Islam. Granted, it would have to be an extremely low order of probability and an extremely well-kept secret, but that just goes to show how little the words mean.
Before this, the last round of “Prince Charles isn’t fit to be Defender of the Faith” stories centered on some things he’d said 20-odd years ago that were sympathetic to goddess-paganism.
The real reason Prince Charles wouldn’t make a good Defender of the Faith is that he’s a liberal. Us liberals don’t do well at defending the One True Faith. What we’re good at is picking faiths apart and noticing that everybody has some part of the Truth and at the same time everybody’s missing some other part of the Truth.
LA replies:
Perhaps you didn’t notice that I was not stating this myself, but was summarizing someone else’s article at Jihad Watch, a more “respectable” site than my own, by the way. Moreover, I said that the author “suggested” Charles’s “possible secret conversion.” That is hardly a positive claim. No one reading my entry would say that people are charging that Charles is a Muslim. Nevertheless, his warm statements about Islam and his announced desire to change his title to “Defender of the Faiths” show that he does not see Britain as a Christian country but as equally Islamic as Christian. Also, the fact that Jihad Watch would make such a statement about the possibility of Charles’s secret conversion is in itself newsworth.
Plainly Charles is an Islam apologist. He denies the real content of Islam, saying that the Koran and the Hadiths should be read symbolically. Okay, he can read it symbolically, but the problem is, Muslims do not read it symbolically and have not done so for 1,400 years. The command to kill all Jews for example, is not symbolic. Thus he would have people to ignore the plain meaning of the Koran, the Hadiths, and Islamic law, and thus render the West helpless to defend itself against Islam. Which of course is the leftist agenda as well, which may be why you defend him.
Mr. Hechtman replies:
I defend Prince Charles for the same reason you attack him—he’s one of us—and I make no apology for that.
But a million news stories get published every day. And every day you draw attention to three or four. That suggests you personally think those three or four have merit.
You want to say Prince Charles is a liberal, go ahead. You want to say he’s soft on what you believe is a clear and present danger to the realm, go ahead. You want to say he puts out a deliberate misinterpretation of Islamic teachings, go ahead.
But unless you think he really and truly is a secret Muslim convert, or that there’s a compelling reason to believe he is, it’s not responsible to draw attention to speculation to that effect.
LA replies:
I respectfully disagree. I am referencing an article in a respectable publication, Jihad Watch, which in turn is citing the Middle East Quarterly (edited by Daniel Pipes):
A 1997 Middle East Quarterly article titled “Prince Charles of Arabia,” by Ronni L. Gordon and David M. Stillman, looked at evidence that Britain’s Prince Charles might be a secret convert to Islam. They sifted through his public statements (defending Islamic law, praising the status of Muslim women, seeing in Islam a solution for Britain’s ailments) and actions (setting up a panel of twelve “wise men” to advise him on Islamic religion and culture), and concluded that “should Charles persist in his admiration of Islam and defamation of his own culture,” his accession to the throne will indeed usher in a “different kind of monarchy.
Prince Charles is not the only possible convert to Islam among Britain’s upper classes. As reported in The Sunday Times of 22 Feb. 2004, some of the country’s top landowners and celebrities, as well as the offspring of senior Establishment figures, have embraced Islam after becoming disillusioned with Western values. Radiance Viewsweekly also reported that “Jonathan Birt, the son of Lord Birt, and Emma Clark, the granddaughter of former liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, are only two of 14,000 mostly-elite white Britons who have reverted to Islam.”
Neither I, nor Jihad Watch, nor Middle East Quarterly, charged that Charles is a secret convert to Islam. The MEQ article “looked at evidence that Britain’s Prince Charles might be a secret convert to Islam.”
The point is that intelligent people believe the evidence triggers in thought the possibility that Charles may be a secret convert.
Second, let’s look again at the original blog entry Mr. Hechtman complains of:
An article at Jihad Watch suggests that Prince Charle’s continuing “admiration of Islam and defamation of his own culture” (quoting a 1997 article in Middle East Quarterly), and his possible secret conversion to Islam that such behavior points to, disqualifies him from being king.
The key idea of the sentence is that it is Charles’s “admiration of Islam and defamation of his own culture” that can be seen as disqualifying him. The phrase, “and his possible secret conversion to Islam that such behavior points to,” is a subordinate phrase, added as a further thought subsidiary to the main thought. Since I was reporting on this item at Jihad Watch, for me not to say that the article mentioned this idea would have been strange.
As for my own opinion, I think it highly unlikely that Charles has converted to Islam. I’ll concede that the blog entry would have been better if I had included that qualification.
Michael writes:
For at least eight years, partly due to my Phd research, I’ve been in contact with Sufi Muslims of the Naqshabandi Tariqah, a branch with strong roots in Turkey and Central Asia, and it’s a commonly held idea among them that Charles is or is on the verge of being a Sufi. A quick google of Prince Charles and Naqshabandi will give some interesting TV transcripts with leaders of the organization on this matter.
But the more interesting, and overlooked, dimension is whether Charles is a perennialist in the vein of his beloved mentor, Laurens van der Post. They would argue that all orthodox faiths (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity et al) teach the same truths, and are all divine revelations. Hence, the title of “defender of the faiths.” This spiritual movement falls under the rubric of Sophia Perennis. Here the intellectual mentors include Fritjof Schuon, Martin Lings, and Syed Hussein Nasr.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2007 10:39 AM | Send