He loves Islamic clothes and camel’s milk
THOSE who know Prince Charles well say that he has a deep reverence for Islam. Indeed, in the Nineties, he took to wearing a flowing Moroccan jalabiya when he walked his dogs in the evening around Highgrove.
For a long time, Charles barely spoke about Islam, but in October 1993 he delivered his first major address at Oxford, during a visit to the university’s Centre for Islamic Studies — for which he’d agreed to be a patron.
This time, in black academic robes, he addressed a capacity crowd of nearly 1,000 scholars.
Warming to one of his favourite themes, he bemoaned the separation of Western man from nature — which had led to the loss of a ‘sense of oneness’.
In particular, he said, Christianity had lost what he considered to be the heart of Islam: a ‘metaphysical and unified view of ourselves and the world around us’.
He was also concerned that Western materialism and mass culture offended not just Muslim extremists, but all Muslims.
And he excused their ‘powerful feeling of disenchantment’ as a rebellion against the inadequacy of Western technology.
The ‘deeper meaning to life,’ he added, ‘lies elsewhere in the essence of Islamic belief.’
Anyone hoping that he might have reservations about the full veiling of women was doomed to disappointment. Women who wore the veil, said Charles, were making ‘a personal statement of their Muslim identity’.
He made no mention of the relentless oppression of women in Saudi Arabia.
His speech came just eight months after the first bombings of New York’s World Trade Center in February 1993. But the prince seemed to downplay the rise of al- Qaeda and the growing menace of Islamic fundamentalism.
Instead, he underlined the worst aspects of Christian culture, giving short shrift to the freedom and tolerance inherent in Western democracies.
His remarks were enthusiastically received in the Arab world.
On his arrival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that November — at three in the morning — Charles was accorded the ‘unprecedented honour’ of a personal welcome from King Fahd.
During that trip, whether mingling with robed sheiks or drinking camel’s milk with Bedouin men, he seemed utterly in his element.
Back in Britain, however, even some of the prince’s supporters were worried that his outspokenness might one day prove his undoing.