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Prince Charles, heir to the British Throne, has called time and again for a better understanding of Islam and urged the West to learn from Islam. He has made several 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.
Following is the speech by Charles on October 27, 1993, at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford where he is a vice patron of the Centre for Islamic Studies.I believe wholeheartedly that the links between these two worlds, Muslims and Christrians,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.
Islamic culture
‘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: 14 centuries too often marked by mutual hostility.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.
Extremist groups
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 judgment of Islam has been grossly distorted by taking the extremes to be the norm. That 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 judgments. 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 poli
tical 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 fourteen 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 mediaeval 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.
Islamic world
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 life – 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.
Modern Europe Prides
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 400 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. Mediaeval 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 was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West.
The surprise 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 endeavor. 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. 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. ‘
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-dependant 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.
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.
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