Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (28 page)

Charles was far from fledged in the late 1970s when he met Laurens van der Post at the Suffolk house of a mutual friend, Captain Robin Sheepshanks. It seems to have been a union of mutual needs, between a Prince longing to find meaning in his existence and a storyteller who could weave apparent answers out of thin air, the one insecure but with the glossiest of social pedigrees, the other self-invented to a stupefying degree.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, van der Post plugged his prot
é
g
é
into a wider network of ideas and people. In the poet Kathleen Raine, the Prince discovered both a safe friendship with a substantially older woman and a repository of the ideas that fascinated and sustained him. Raine had founded a journal “devoted to the arts of the imagination,”
Temenos
(the word means “sacred space”). She met Charles over dinner at Kensington Palace. “I thought, that poor young man—anything I can do for him, I will do, because he is very lonely,” she said later.
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Van der Post died in 1996, three months after Charles’s divorce came through, leaving his younger friend in a wilderness more impervious than any they had visited together. During the years of bleakness, anyone the Prince felt he could trust took on more importance to him than ever; his instinct to search for wider and higher meanings became more urgent. He made frequent visits to Raine’s house in Chelsea for tea and cake and long discussions about “flowers and gardens … the encroaching technology and materialism of the modern world … art and architecture, music and poetry.”
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Always they talked about their joint project, to return the world to an awareness of ancient wisdoms.

In 1990, with Charles’s encouragement, Raine set up the Temenos Academy, and for a period from 1992 ran the organization from a perch within the Prince’s newly established Institute of Architecture. The founding aim of the Academy, and its journal, relaunched as the
Temenos Academy Review
, was to spread the philosophy of Perennialism—the notion of a universal truth that underpins all the major religions and is not the sole preserve of the Church of England or any Christian communion. “The arts of the imagination flourish … in the Temenos—the precinct of that sacred centre, be that centre temple, synagogue, church, mosque, or the invisible sanctuary within the heart,” explained Raine in a statement that still garnishes the Temenos website. “Since knowledge is universal, we seek to learn from all traditions.”
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In 2003 Charles attended Raine’s small private funeral and spoke at a remembrance service held later the same year at St. James’s Palace. He revealed that Raine had sympathized with him, seeing his role as heir to the throne as “the most difficult task in England.” He quoted her advice: “Dear, dear Prince, don’t give that riff-raff an inch of ground, not a hair’s breadth; stand firm on the holy ground of the heart. The only way to deal with the evil forces of their world is from a higher level, not to meet them on their own.” In closing his eulogy, he adapted a line from
Hamlet
: “May God rest her dear departed soul and may flights of angels sing her to her rest.”
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Once as anguished as the Prince of Denmark, the Prince of Britain and the Realms through his associations with Raine and van der Post acquired a vision of the world in which everything made some kind of sense. He has continued to elaborate that vision and his confidence is growing in step with his personal happiness. “He has assumed a certainty in the time I’ve known him,” says Skelly, these days Chairman of the Temenos Academy. “He’s much more sure of himself, philosophically. He has a wisdom about him.”
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Charles remembers his mentors with fondness and gratitude. Some in the British establishment, indeed in Buckingham Palace, regard their legacy with deep mistrust.

*   *   *

In
Harmony
, the Prince traces a “golden thread” of wisdom “from Pythagoras and Plato to Shakespeare and [fifteenth-century Italian priest Marsilio] Ficino, from [Italian Renaissance painter] Giorgione, Bach and Handel to Wordsworth, Poussin and Blake—all of these great artists were very clear that there is a harmony to the world that must be maintained.”
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He might have traced the same thread to a significant twentieth-century destination, French-Egyptian philosopher Ren
é
Gu
é
non, or onward to German-French-Swiss–US resident Frithjof Schuon. Both men interwove strands of Islamic esoterism, in particular Sufism, into Traditionalism, a philosophical branch closely allied to Perennialism.

The Prince may not name check all of his influences in
Harmony
but he does summon up a Sufi aphorism: “Although there are many lamps, it is all the same light.”
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This is the view of religion that strikes fear into some of the functionaries of Lambeth and Buckingham palaces, gets mistaken for pick-and-mix New Ageism, and also feeds conspiracy theories about the Prince’s secret conversion to Islam or to Orthodoxy. It is the fundament of the Prince’s determination to be a Defender of Faith, rather than
the
Faith. Yet it is also the fundament of the Prince’s faith, and that faith is Anglican, albeit higher Church and more mystically inclined than that of many of his co-confessionals. Prayer is as much a part of the Prince’s late-night routine as his red boxes. In Charles the Church of England stands to gain a Supreme Governor who takes his duties, and his religion, exceptionally seriously.

Prominent among those duties, as he interprets them, is interfaith work, helping Crown and Country—and its established Church—to come to terms with an increasingly diverse population, and in turn to help that population to live harmoniously. The 2011 Census of England and Wales produced stark figures: 59.3 percent of the population identified as Christian, down from 71.1 percent at the census a decade earlier. The Muslim population, though still small by comparison, has grown from 3 percent of the total in 2001 to 4.8 percent, and in some inner-city areas is a far more significant presence—34.5 percent in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. More than 22 percent of Londoners practice a religion other than Christianity.
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A similar proportion, slightly lower in London, slightly higher across England and Wales, has no faith affiliation.

These changes represent challenges to what politicians have taken to calling “community cohesion,” most often when that spirit is lacking. At the sharp end, in areas of high unemployment and deprivation, the competition for scarce resources easily takes on sectarian and racial tones that populist movements encourage and exploit. Islamophobia is increasing; so too is the appeal to some younger Muslims and British converts of forms of Islam that are irredeemably at odds with notions of happy multiculturalism. The toll of hate crimes against religions continues to rise; the proportion carried out in the name of religion is less frequently documented, but the murder of Lee Rigby in May 2013 by two Britons of Nigerian descent who had converted to Islam became the pretext for a spate of attacks not only against Muslim targets but other faith groups. Sectarian enmities from distant conflicts also play out on British streets.

The answer, Charles believes, must be “to remind people of what we share in common,” and he uses speeches, meetings, and more formalized initiatives to try to do that, as well as visiting, again and again, churches of different denominations, synagogues, mosques, and temples, in Britain and elsewhere.
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Many initiatives involve bringing different faith groups together. In 2006 the Prince opened St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, established by the Bishop of London in a London church rebuilt after an IRA bomb. “You don’t just sit back and say you know [all faiths] are marvelous; you engage, you create friendships, you devise methodology like scriptural reasoning where you sit down with Sikhs, with Jews, with Muslims,” says Chartres. “We take as a horizon a pressing contemporary problem and we actually draw resources out of our own scriptures not arguing with one another but listening acutely and accountably speaking to one another and you always emerge from that more deeply convinced about your own Christian identity and more deeply respectful at the same time.”
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“The royals in general and HRH in particular do interfaith better than anyone,” says Jonathan Sacks.
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At the time of the conversation in August 2013, Lord Sacks was entering his last fortnight as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. He first met Charles seventeen years earlier aboard a private jet to London, after the funeral of Israel’s murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The then leader of Britain’s main opposition party, Labour’s Tony Blair, also hitched a ride. As the Prince sat, nose in a book, Blair leaned over and asked him what he was reading. It turned out to be the Hebrew Bible, and soon everyone present had been drawn into a wide-ranging discussion. Sacks remembers being impressed not only by Charles’s theological knowledge but his broader take on issues. “He had so carefully thought through positions,” Sacks recalls. “You cannot be with HRH for very long without realising that he has thought immensely about really big vision-type issues. He thinks on a very broad canvas and he has an integrated worldview.”

Such a view is often conflated with what Richard Chartres terms “upper middle class religion, taking a
bon bouche
from here and there, a bit of Californian Buddhism mixed with a bit of Sufism—a religion which deifies your tastes.” This, says the Bishop, is “no good at all, unless you commit yourself seriously to a way in God’s good time you will be brought to a position where you can befriend all the lovers of God.… You need a way that brings you to a point of unity, poised where you can love without distortions or hidden agendas, you can appreciate. That’s absolutely central and anybody who really feels that they have to subject the other to withering negative criticism just shows how little progress they’ve made on their own way. That’s a sign of spiritual immaturity. So I rejoice in the fact that the Prince of Wales loves Islam.”
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CHAPTER 8

A Foreign Asset

On a visit to Saudi Arabia in February 2014 Charles donned a
ghutra
, the traditional cotton headdress folded over a kafiyyeh, or skullcap, and the full-length shirt called a
thawb
, to participate in a sword dance. “I’m a fake sheikh,” he told a wide-eyed child. The ostensible reason for this display was to celebrate the Janadriyah Festival, an annual cultural event. His footwork wasn’t up to the standard that makes Emma Thompson go into a mock swoon or over the years has enlivened Balmoral balls, put a spring into tea dances, gingered up the Rio Carnival, and impressed at least one Degree of the Three. Nor did it win him approval among critics of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom ruled over by an absolute monarchy that only introduced the country’s Basic Law in 1992, after the first Gulf War, and retained its clutch throughout the Arab Spring. King Abdullah has been hailed as a modernizer, and he is—but only by the archconservative standards of his predecessor and older brother, King Fahd. Abdullah, who turned ninety in August 2014, brooks no dissent. Anyone organizing protests or publicly criticizing the government risks prosecution and severe penalties. “Tarnishing the reputation of the state” is defined as an act of terrorism. So is atheism. Yet despite the country’s sweeping anti-terror laws, the oil-rich nation (it straddles almost a fifth of the world’s proven oil reserves) remains a crucible and source of funding for the kind of jihadism that produced Osama bin Laden and continues to inspire violent Sunni organizations such as al-Shabab, Boko Haram, and the self-styled Islamic State. Generations of Saudi rulers have promoted the ultraorthodox Wahhabist sect in a strategy to maintain power, ironically creating their own most potent enemy.

Among the other primary targets of Sunni jihadists are other Muslims they consider infidels, including Shia Muslims, now the majority populations in Iran and Iraq, who after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 made the fateful decision to follow the hereditary principle and support his descendants in the struggle to lead Islam. The Sunnis back then called for a democratically chosen Caliph, but the people who kill in the name of Sunni Islam care little for democratic mandates, reserving a special animus towards western democracies and in particular the “Great Satan,” America. The term was originally coined by the Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the revolution that deposed Iran’s royalty. Iran has helped to finance Shia militant groups including Lebanon-based Hezbollah and the Palestinian organization Hamas that direct their fire against Sunni and Western targets. In the intricate history of the Sunni and Shia conflict and Islam’s conflict with the West, one’s enemy’s enemies are rarely friends.

As Charles acknowledged in a 1993 speech, the hostilities owe some of their venom and a good deal of their complexity to Western interventions over fourteen centuries. “Extremism is no more the monopoly of Islam than it is the monopoly of other religions, including Christianity,” he said and set to illustrating the point. “To Western schoolchildren, the 200 years of the 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 endeavor 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 civilization in Europe.