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.
Read it all at Spiked Online