In a speech before the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, Prince Charles of England declared “the Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasures of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity.” About that, there should be no question. From preserving the works of Aristotle and Plato when they were either ignored or actually destroyed by the Catholic Church, to advances in mathematics and medicine in medieval times, to the continued ability to bring personal meaning and fulfillment to the lives of millions — are all historic facts.

Had the heir apparent to both the English Crown and leadership of the Church of England stopped there, none but those who hate Islam could have objected. Unfortunately, Prince Charles went much further, acting as a bizarre apologist for ugly trends in contemporary Islam, ignoring the gifts of modern secular culture, perpetuating the very problems his talk was meant to address.
Claiming that the wisdom of Islam “is now obscured by the dominant drive toward Western materialism — the feeling that to be truly modern, you have to ape the West”, the Prince forgot that the reason the gifts of Islam’s noble heritage are often ignored have more to do with the fact that no religious tradition in the world today is more mobilized to spill blood than is Islam. And that has nothing to do with “the West” — itself a ridiculous term in light of the fact that Islam is also a western religious tradition with tens of millions of native born adherents in western nations. In fact, far from being an Islam vs. “the West” problem, Muslims kill far more Muslims in the name of their faith than they do Jews, Christians, and atheists put together. So the Prince really blew it there.
His comments even suggest that one is somehow a better Muslim when they reject western practices, perpetuating a dangerous false dichotomy between faithfulness to one’s spiritual tradition and participation in the larger culture of liberal democracy which is the west at its best. Unless he is signing folks up for the Taliban or Iran’s religion police, his comments boggle the mind.

In fact, the premise that the more one stands up against the west, not “aping” it but resisting its contemporary discourse and values, the truer one is to their particular faith, is a perspective that can be directly tied to murder and mayhem committed by followers of many faiths.
So, not only are the Prince’s remarks a misunderstanding of a conflict between Islam and the West, they miss the fact that this is not exclusively a problem of Islam. The problem is one between totalitarians of any faith who cannot rest until theirs is the only way. In his drive to reconnect with the genuine wisdom to be found in one of the world’s great traditions, Prince Charles actually perpetuated one of the contemporary world’s most significant challenges.
The challenge is not how out of touch any of us may be with any particular faith tradition, but rather how to move from totalitarian understandings of the traditions we may love to one of dialogue between the multiple systems which inform our lives. Apparently, Prince Charles is not up to that challenge.
He is certainly correct when he addresses the fact that technology and modern conveniences alone will neither provide the happiness which we seek nor the guidance we need in evaluating how best to nurture the health of our planet. Nor is he off base to remind us that we ignore the wisdom of any one tradition at our peril. In fact, when we ignore matters of the spirit for a purely mechanistic understanding of the world, we are perpetuating the same dangerously single-minded approach advocated by many who eschew all religious wisdom traditions not only in terms of personal practice but as sources of intellectual growth.
When however, Prince Charles remarks, as he did in Oxford, that “Only sacred traditions have the capacity to help” make the necessary recovery of the soul which we all need, he strays across the line from advocacy on behalf of a wider way of addressing the biggest questions we face as a planet, to advocacy for the superiority of one way of addressing those problems. If that his version of progress, we should all pray for the health of his mother, the Queen.