Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (29 page)

“The point, I think, is not that one or other picture is more true, or has a monopoly of truth. It is that misunderstandings arise when we fail to appreciate how others look at the world, its history, and our respective roles in it. The corollary of how we in the West see our history has so often been to regard Islam as a threat—in medieval times as a military conqueror, and in more modern times as a source of intolerance, extremism and terrorism.”
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The speech stood at odds with much mainstream Western thinking. “At that time, he was far ahead of others in coming up with the view that something needs to be done to bring about a better understanding between the Islamic world and the West,” says Farhan Nizami, the founding Director of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies where the Prince delivered the speech. “To be calling for the Islamic world and the West to work together, to say we were almost at the crossroads, I think was remarkably prescient.”
2

Charles has been, in the words of Nizami, “a very active patron” of the Oxford institution, helping to attract a range of speakers as varied as the St. James’s Palace guest list: from the icon of reconciliation, Nelson Mandela, to avatars of more repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal, who told the audience that “Saudi Arabia is thrust towards assuming a position of influence and authority to maintain the moral tradition and the purity of Islam.”
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Of all these speakers, Charles made the biggest splash. His speech not only sounded radical; it was carefully strategized, made just ahead of a trip to the Gulf that the Prince feared would be a rerun of previous trips—polite, content-free meetings in air-conditioned rooms. He used the platform to draw attention to “the terrible sufferings” of Bosnian Muslims and to inveigh against Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq. He also appeared to hold up Islam as an antidote to Western materialism, already betraying his concerns about post-Enlightenment Christianity and its acceptance of “mechanistic science.” “At the heart of Islam is its preservation of an integral view of the universe,” the Prince told his audience at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. “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.”
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He was describing his own holistic philosophy.

In the Gulf nations, as in the wider Muslim world, Charles’s speech drew warm applause. When he arrived in Saudi Arabia, King Fahd set aside usual protocols to greet him at his guesthouse before dawn. In Britain, the heir to the throne’s views on Islam, expounded in further speeches and enthusiastically demonstrated through many more visits and meetings, interfaith initiatives, and his continuing patronage of the institution run by Nizami—in receipt of funding by Saudi Arabia as well as other countries—have aroused the mixture of amusement and rancor that often attends his efforts.
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Columnists mock him: Does he not know the penalties for adultery under sharia law? In Saudi Arabia cheating on your spouse carries a potential death sentence.

Conspiracists of all waters find in his connections with the Muslim world confirmation of his murky aims. “Prince Charles has been placed by the Queen at the head of the British-Saudi Empire terror machine, utilizing relationships he has developed over more than a quarter of a century,” declare Richard Freeman and William F. Wertz Jr., the authors of an essay published by Lyndon LaRouche, an arch-conspiracist, failed US presidential candidate, and convicted fraudster. “Charles is [also] at the forefront of Queen Elizabeth’s drive, through starvation, disease, war, and murder, to reduce the world’s population from its present 7 billion persons to 1 billion.”
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Dianaists posit that the Prince’s interest in Islam stems from his need to compete with his former wife’s Muslim boyfriends, Hasnat Khan and Dodi Fayed, ignoring not only a psychology that makes that interpretation implausible but a time line that makes it impossible. Another persistent theme insists that the Prince is a Muslim revert.

To many liberals, the Prince’s tendresse for Islam equates to support for repressive interpretations of the faith and for the regimes that rule in its name, especially Saudi Arabia and its dictatorial monarchy. The book
Saudi Babylon
relates that Alan Gerson, a lawyer for the 9/11 families, asked in a 2003 meeting at New Scotland Yard if the UK authorities had “uncovered anything to show the charities run by some members of the Saudi royal family were channeling money to the terrorists.” Stephen Ratcliffe, a Special Branch officer tasked with tracing terrorist money, is described as appearing “hesitant and a little sheepish” in response. “‘Our ability to investigate the Saudis is very limited,’ he said. He then paused, looked across at a photograph of Prince Charles on the wall, raised his eyebrows and smiled knowingly without saying a word.”
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The Salman Rushdie affair saw Charles side with Islamic conservatives. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989 for his novel
The Satanic Verses
. The ostensible grounds for Khomeini’s call to murder Rushdie was that his book had insulted Islam; the cleric’s deeper aim was to position Shia Iran and not Sunni-led Saudi Arabia as the fulcrum of the Islamic revolution. This twisted view of events, in which Rushdie, rather than his persecutors, was the offender, found some powerful allies in Margaret Thatcher’s government—she appears in cameo in
The Satanic Verses
as Mrs. Torture—and in Lambeth Palace. Robert Runcie let it be known he could “well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for.”

Elsewhere blows were traded in place of words, spilling over into riots in which forty-two people died and violent attacks on those involved in publishing the book. A would-be Rushdie assassin accidentally blew himself up. The book’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death. Rushdie went into hiding. In this febrile atmosphere Rushdie’s friend and fellow author Martin Amis found himself at a dining table in royal company. “I had an argument with Prince Charles at a small dinner party,” Amis recalled in an interview marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fatwa. “He said—very typically, it seems to me—‘I’m sorry, but if someone insults someone else’s deepest convictions, well then,’ blah blah blah.… And I said that a novel doesn’t set out to insult anyone. ‘It sets out to give pleasure to its readers,’ I told him. ‘A novel is an essentially playful undertaking, and this is an exceedingly playful novel.’ The Prince took it on board, but I’d suppose the next night at a different party he would have said the same thing.”
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It’s unlikely Charles had read
The Satanic Verses
. In their Cambridge days, Lucia Santa Cruz persuaded her friend to read
Anna Karenina
, she says, remarking that despite the false, fervid speculation that attended their platonic friendship, the novel was the only new experience she provided him. “He said he liked [the novel], but he never wanted to read another one, I don’t think. He always wanted to stick to history or essays,” she adds.
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In Rushdie’s most famous work the Prince may have been surprised to find a measure of what he says he wants to foster—a serious engagement with Islam that does not shrink from criticism. In 2006, Charles used a speech at the Imam Muhammad bin Saud University in Riyadh to issue a call for a more flexible reading of scripture that was startling within the context of the deeply conservative Islamic institution.

More recently, Charles has begun to campaign for Christian communities that are being targeted by fundamentalists in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and other predominantly Muslim countries, taking that message of concern direct to the Gulf, on the trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Bahrain in February 2014 that produced the images of the Prince participating in the sword dance.

His critics spotted blood on the dance floor. Amnesty UK called on the Prince to raise human rights abuses with his Saudi hosts while its Twitter feed posted a link to the video. “Prince Charles’s sword dance,” read the accompanying tweet. “Yes, they like swords in Saudi Arabia. Including for public executions.”

It did nothing to dispel dark interpretations of the Prince’s mission that the British aerospace company BAE Systems announced the conclusion of a deal to sell Typhoon jets to the Saudi government the day after he left Riyadh for Doha. In the
Guardian
, defense and security writer Richard Norton-Taylor quoted Andrew Smith, spokesman for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, CAAT: “It is clear that Prince Charles has been used by the UK government and BAE Systems as an arms dealer.” The Prince’s aides deny—with unusual ferocity—that the arms deal came up in any of his conversations. No matter. “It did not have to,” wrote Norton-Taylor. “The Saudis must have got the message. It was the heir to the British throne’s tenth official visit to the feudal monarchy. He made his trip, we are told, at the request of the Foreign Office.”
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The Prince, so often criticized for crosscutting with ministerial work, had indeed dutifully carried out the wishes of Her Majesty’s Government in traveling to Saudi Arabia, according to sources in HM Government. He went at the FCO’s request and with an agenda briefed to him in advance. He raised his anxieties about Christian communities in the Gulf states and about the luxury-oriented, car-centered, energy-spendthrift cities in the Middle East that call into question his notion that Islam is naturally in sympathy with the environment. He met young entrepreneurs in Riyadh, ecologists in Doha, participated in an interfaith dialogue. Yet his government business took precedence.

Ever since the Prince’s Oxford speech, he has the confidence of key contacts in the region, not least the Gulf royals who regard him not only as an equal, but a defender of Islam. “I do not know of another major Western figure anywhere who would have as high a standing in the Muslim world as the Prince of Wales,” says Nizami.
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“The value he brings to this is the value of long-term relationships, not short-term transactional ones,” says an insider. “That is immensely reassuring to his interlocutors.”

This has made the Prince an effective asset for the Foreign Office and the British intelligence community in certain key regions, able to transmit the British viewpoint to major players and to glean information that may not be so readily divulged to a minister of state or diplomat. Sources say these missions always take account of the constitutional limits to his role: he would not be asked to negotiate or conclude deals, whether political or commercial, but to advise and warn, promote and listen. A source close to the Prince says he doesn’t like being used to market weaponry and now sidesteps such activities where possible. That wasn’t always the case. In Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1994 documentary, Charles defends his appearance at the Dubai arms fair on the basis that he is boosting British trade, arguing that the arms will likely be used as a deterrent and if the UK doesn’t sell them, someone else will. If he has changed his mind, why doesn’t the dissident Prince speak up? One answer, according to insiders, is that he has done so, in—thus far—private communications. If he is uncomfortable with his itineraries, he will say so, in terms and in ink with underlinings.

Another answer is that any noisy protests on his part would diminish his usefulness in the Gulf. Some of the objectives of his recent trip to Saudi Arabia relied on that vanishing commodity: secrecy. All of them relied on his close skein of relationships in the region. “It’s soft, it’s track-five diplomacy, under
ü
ber-Chatham House rules,” says a source. As the Prince put on his headdress, picked up his sword, and set to dancing, London harbored deepening fears that Saudi support for the Syrian insurgency had not only failed in the objective of toppling President Assad, but continued to strengthen jihadi groups that draw many of their fighters from radicalized youth from outside Syria. The conflict has also displaced millions of refugees. At private meetings with the King and other Saudi royals, including Abdullah’s youngest brother and subsequently anointed heir Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, the Prince discussed how the Saudis could best target humanitarian aid and articulated the risk of blowback as battle-hardened militants returned home—whether to Saudi Arabia or the UK. The Prince also communicated British worries about wider regional stability and in particular the capture by the group then calling itself ISIS of the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

There must be questions about any initiative that gives succor to the Saudi regime or attempts to appease the unappeasable. At the time, Britain aimed to do both. Less than two months after Charles’s visit, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief and driver of the misfired Syria policy, stood down. The choice of his successor, Interior Minister Mohamed bin Nayef, signaled closer strategic and intelligence cooperation between Saudi Arabia and its Western allies just as the crisis in the region sharpened, with ISIS forces sweeping into Iraq. The Saudis are deeply problematic allies, says a source. British and US foreign policy is in disarray but for now there is no alternative to trying to work with the Saudis. The Prince’s discussions, while not conclusive, “may well have aided clear thinking in exalted [Saudi] circles,” the source adds.

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Service to Queen and country often goes unrecognized, as Charles knows, and not only from direct experience. As heir to the throne and in his duties representing the Queen, he receives regular briefings from intelligence officials and has made private visits to the headquarters of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ. “You can usually ensure a moment when large numbers of staff gather round a central atrium,” says an aide. Charles has also met teams in Northern Ireland and farther-flung locations. “The Prince’s visits are greatly appreciated by staff,” says a statement from the organizations provided for this book. A former field operative remembers such a visit as “slightly unreal but [it] cheered everybody up.”