Unity in Faith: The Prince of Wales’ speech delivered at Al-Azhar
April 3rd, 2006 by sfuqua
On the first day of spring, March 21, Charles, Prince of Wales, spoke to a gathering at the University of Al Azhar in Egypt. He speech focused on the commonalities of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — all based in the Abrahamic traditions — and the need for all parties to look deeply at their understanding of the other, (re) learning to appreciate the strength of each and the examples history has for us of fruitful collaboration between the three.
I
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been enormously
touched that you should have considered inviting me to speak at this
most venerable and ancient place of worship and learning. You have
done me the greatest honour through your invitation, and indeed
through conferring this much treasured honorary doctorate on me, and
I count it a very special privilege to visit the University of Al
Azhar and, indeed, to return to Egypt – a country for which I have a
particular affection and which, for many, has a sacred significance
as the place of refuge for the child Jesus.
I would like to begin by paying tribute to the man who first
encouraged me to accept the invitation to speak here, a dear friend
and graduate of this great university, Shaikh Zaki Badawi. His
sudden death in January was a profound shock and an immense sadness
to many of us across the world. He was a man of real wisdom and
learning. With the humility of a true scholar, he made his great
knowledge accessible to others – and did so with an irresistible
sense of humour. I am so pleased and proud that his widow Lady
Badawi is with us for this occasion.
I do not claim to be a scholar, other than having studied history at
the University of Cambridge – not quite as old as this one, but I do
have a great interest in exploring the Abrahamic tradition into which
I was born. This tradition has shaped me and made me who I am.
Today I stand before you as one belonging to the family of faiths
connected by that tradition.
II
The roots of the faith that we share in the One God, the God of
Abraham, give us enduring values. We need the courage to speak of
them and affirm them again and again to a world troubled by change
and dissension. That is the message which, above all, I wish to
leave you with today. First, and highest among those values of our
common inheritance, and born of our love of God, must always come
respect for each other, and for His creation. Our respect for all
God’s creatures and for the environment is the expression of our
respect for the Creator whose inspiration is the entire manifest
world.
Secondly, and following from this, our beliefs and values call out
for peace and not conflict. We may have a human weakness to
criticise and to compete with each other. But what we have in
common, as people of faith, calls us beyond this towards mutual
respect and understanding.
Thirdly, the great Abrahamic traditions speak of a faith which rests
in the heart beyond the limitations of our intellectual knowledge and
judgement. Wherever we are placed in our human society, whatever the
advantages or disadvantages we have in ability or education, we
perceive the truths of our faith with the `eye of the heart’. The
Prophet Moses reminded us that the heart is the seat of faith: "Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart" . I believe that
the great faiths speak through their sacred texts to the heart, and
that faith itself is heart-felt.
But while I cherish the connections within the history of our
different Abrahamic Faiths, I do not want you to imagine for one
moment that I think that they are one and the same. There are
differences, and we should celebrate them. But in the things that
matter most, we have a common root. In my view, God’s purpose should
never be in doubt: it is to bind us closer together! Unity through
diversity… Indeed, it has always moved me that the Holy Koran has a
verse: "O Mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and
a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each
other (not that ye may despise each other)."
III
I first voiced my thoughts publicly on relations between Islam and
the West in 1993, in a speech at another great university, Oxford.
Something I said then has troubled me ever since. I said:
…despite the advances in technology and mass communication in the
second half of the twentieth century, despite mass travel and the
intermingling of races…misunderstandings between Islam and the West
continue. Indeed they may be growing.
Tragically, the intervening twelve years have confirmed my fears and,
for so many, those years have been profoundly bleak. My heart is
heavy from witnessing the never-ending death and destruction – the
kind of death and destruction I understand only too well, having
experienced the loss of my beloved Great Uncle, Lord Mountbatten, at
the hands of terrorist bombers in 1979. Images of communities torn
apart by religious conflict are deeply harrowing – from Bosnia to
Baghdad, from Chechnya to Palestine – evidence of just how far
misunderstandings have continued and escalated. Violence, so often
justified in the name of religion, effects a terrible hardening of
hearts. What good can possibly come of all of this?
In that same speech, I talked about the history of Europe and the
Islamic world – how they were inextricably entwined, and how, through
the centuries, the giving and taking on both sides had contributed so
greatly to what we have become today. History shows what giant leaps
of creativity in knowledge – in science, literature and the arts –
have occurred when the members of the Abrahamic family have worked
together. Can we not draw inspiration from the great explosion of
knowledge and understanding which took place under the Abbassids
between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when their capital
Baghdad was a world centre of learning; or from Islamic Spain between
the tenth and the fourteenth centuries, when in cities such as
Cordoba and Toledo, the work of Christian, Muslim and Jewish scholars
led to the flowering of the Renaissance? We need to remember that we
in the West are in debt to the scholars of Islam, for it was thanks
to them that during the Dark Ages in Europe the treasures of
classical learning were kept alive.
But in that same speech I also spoke of how, sadly, despite this
fertile flow of ideas, many on both sides had still been left with
uncompromising prejudices towards each other’s cultures. This
lingering mutual distrust persists, and with dreadful results. I
think of the experience of Muslims living in Europe who are subject
to varied and continuous expressions of Islamophobia by fellow-
Europeans. I think of Christians living within some Muslim nations,
who find themselves fettered by harsh and degrading restrictions, or
subject to abuse by some of their fellow-citizens. And I think of
dreadful acts of terrorism and violence across the world, carried out
in the distorted name of faith.
I believe with all my heart that responsible men and women must work
to restore mutual respect between faiths, and that we should do all
we can to overcome the distrust that poisons so many people’s lives.
This, of course, is made infinitely more difficult by the stereotypes
and absurdities propagated by certain sections of the Media. In my
own very modest way, through the work of my Prince’s Trust, my
Foundation for the Built Environment and my School of Traditional
Arts, I have sought to find ways to integrate communities and to
celebrate the virtues of Islamic cultures in the United Kingdom. As
these programmes develop across other countries, I hope that they may
serve as a model for communities elsewhere. Even from small projects
and examples the foundations of mutual respect, consideration and
courtesy can be rebuilt, sometimes through the physical design of
people’s surroundings – surroundings which can help to enhance our
shared humanity rather than treat us as technological adjuncts to the
increasingly mechanistic world around us.
IV
The legacy of misunderstanding and conflict between religions has had
a central role in the terrible history of war and violence. And none
more so, of course, than the truly apocalyptic cruelty and
destruction caused by the two unholy, secular "religions" of
Communism and Fascism.
Over the centuries, as societies have evolved, we can often see two
distinct reactions to this ruinous legacy. Some hold ever more
tightly to their religion, as a source of stability in their lives –
and, as conflicts rage, they identify other traditions only as
threats. Others become disenchanted with religion altogether; with
the whole concept of metaphysics and a dimension beyond ourselves.
They abandon any faith in God, and see religion itself
as "backward," "primitive" and "wrong". This disenchantment and
indifference poses a danger for our inheritance of faith, universal
values and a living tradition. Coupled with an obsession with
materialism and trivia, it is a threat across the world, not least to
our own traditional Christian culture.
In Europe, it was partly in reaction to the apparently ceaseless wars
between different Christian denominations that many sincere people
came to think that if we could only create truly secular societies in
which the bigotry, violence and pedantry that people associated with
religion would disappear, the underlying sources of conflict would be
removed, and we would all get on better. They hoped that if, in the
place of institutionalized religion, the material wellbeing and
security of the people could be enhanced and protected through the
discoveries of science, then the march to harmony, progress and human
happiness would continue unopposed.
Inevitably, it has not turned out to be quite so easy. As we are
finding, scientific knowledge, which has brought us all so much that
we value and are privileged to take for granted, is not the same as
Wisdom. For it is Wisdom alone that can reveal to us those universal
and eternal truths that lie at the heart of all the great
traditions. In many people’s lives today these truths, which
provided our forefathers with a secure framework for their existence
and with a clear set of ethical values, have become obscured, have
disappeared entirely from their lives. This is not a phenomenon
peculiar to the West. We see it in each strand of the Abrahamic
faiths.
The implications of this loss run deep. For I believe that
moderation comes from the Wisdom passed down to us through
tradition. Extremism exploits our loss of respect for tradition.
Loss of religious certainty is pushing many to take refuge in new
absolutes which, like any primitive belief, tolerate no doubt or
reservation, but lead to various forms of extremism.
We need to recover the depth, the subtlety, the generosity of
imagination, the respect for Wisdom that so marked Islam in its great
ages. Islam called Jews and Christians the peoples of the book,
because they, like Muslims are a part of a religion of sacred texts:
the Koran, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament. And what was so
distinctive of the great ages of faith was that they understood that,
as well as sacred texts, there is the art of interpretation of sacred
texts – and this is a difficult and subtle art that gave rise in
Islam to great principles of interpretation and great schools of
jurisprudence.
Between the text and the meaning of the text – between the meaning of
God’s word for all time and its meaning for this time – falls the act
of interpretation. It was Islam’s greatness to understand this in
its full depth and challenge. And this is what you, at this great
and historic institution, can give not only to Islam, but, by
example, to all the other children of Abraham.
Today, too often, there seems to be a tendency to read texts as if
they needed no interpretation, as if we could read their meaning on
the surface. That does violence to the Divine word, and violence to
the word eventually leads to violence to the person, and to the
world.
When all we can hear in sacred texts is simple certainties, when all
we can see in God’s multicoloured world is black and white, we begin
to divide humanity into simple oppositions: the good and the evil;
the pious and the profane; us and the enemy. And this then leads to
hatred and violence. For it is then that we lose the single most
important principle that unites the Abrahamic faiths: in
Judaism, "Love your neighbour as yourself" ; in Christianity, "All
things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye so to
them" ; and in Islam "No-one of you is a believer until he desires
for his brother that which he desires for himself".
V
If we are to heed these teachings, to ensure that the voice of
moderation can continue to be heard, and to oppose extremism, what do
our understandings of God, implicit in our faiths, have to say that
might help us? First of all, the Good Lord surely does not mean us
to kill each other – that is in all our traditions. Secondly, in a
world of abstractions, materialism and loss of spiritual meaning,
surely those of us who share a faith in something beyond merely
ourselves, beyond the ego and the passions, beyond the worship of
science for its own sake, who have faith in a harmonious universe
that balances mind, body and spirit, the heart and the head, in an
understanding of the divine order that is God’s mysterious and loving
gift to the created world – surely, surely we should be uniting
together on the basis of our shared beliefs? Surely the wisdom I
have referred to earlier should warn us that far from fighting each
other, or arguing about futile abstractions, we should be working
together in the face of the immense environmental crisis threatening
our entire planet? What, then, can we learn from Islam that will
help us re-integrate ourselves with Nature? Can we not see the
urgent need before it is too late to blend the intuitive genius of
the East with the practical genius of the West?
Central to the teachings of all our faiths is an emphasis on respect
for each other. This is much more than a political argument about
the rights of minorities. Muslims, Christians and Jews are united in
believing in the dignity and value of the individual. Each of us is
unique and of unique value to God. When we know ourselves, our
frailties and weaknesses, we can see the importance of understanding
towards others – of seeing the other’s point of view.
Respect for others, and for what is precious to others – in other
words good manners, civility, and a willingness to listen – ensures
respect towards our own values and ideals. The recent ghastly strife
and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our
failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to
others. In my view, the true mark of a civilized society is the
respect it pays to minorities and to strangers. Generous, hospitable
welcome to strangers and to those on their travels is justifiably a
proud element of Arab culture. We in Britain have made great efforts
to welcome people of other faiths, and to enable them to preserve
their unique identities, while at the same time accommodating
themselves to British culture. There are now more than a million and
a half British Muslims. They enrich British society in countless
ways, as, I am sure, do the Christian minorities in Muslim nations.
As people of faith, we know, too, that the human spirit is called to
the horizon of eternity. We sense intuitively that we are too
frequently focussed on the external world, which so often discounts
what cannot be measured and weighed. But how can we measure or weigh
Faith, Beauty, Loyalty, Joy, or indeed Love itself – all the things
that make life worth living and help define the essence of our
humanity? Do not these qualities represent an inner reality? And,
when we speak of an inner reality, we are in fact speaking of that
dimension which sees beyond the material – in other words, we are
speaking once more of the heart. We speak metaphorically of the
heart as the source of compassion – the "charity" to which St. Paul
refers in one translation of the Bible – which, for Christians, is
the supreme virtue.
When we face problems of understanding between cultures and
religions, is not what is missing just that perception: the
perception of the heart which is kind, moderate and full of
acceptance? This is the perception in which we can all share and
which is brought to mind by the writings and example of the great
mystics in our different traditions – people like Julian of Norwich,
Rabbi Isaac Luria, and Imam Muhammad Idris al-Shafi. Do not these
great men and women, with their perennial wisdom, tell us of the need
to balance our often aggressive and superficial behaviour with a more
gentle, contemplative attitude – a turning from the head to that
domain of the heart where the goodness in our common humanity is to
be found? Let me be clear: this is not an argument about
contemplative withdrawal, but rather a prescription for active
engagement in our dealings with others. After all, we share together
a tradition of revelation that has informed the very essence of our
faiths. Interestingly, science is beginning to discover the order
and harmony inherent within Nature – something that was revealed to
the ancients thousands of years ago. Surely this indicates a
profound truth about the pattern of the inner life and its
relationship with God’s mysterious pattern for the manifested world?
VI
I believe we have a shared duty to speak for the principles of our
religious faiths. I believe we must protect the integrity of all our
traditions – Muslim, Christian and Jewish – acknowledging and
celebrating our rich diversity which, at the end of the day, is our
only guarantee against the domination of a uniform, monocultural,
global culture, whether religious or secular.
And I believe that, to defend the realm of the spirit against
materialism, and the transcendent dignity of each one of us against
extremism and self-idolatry, we must foster, encourage and act upon
that which embodies the divine attributes of mercy and compassion.
That calls for calmness and the exercise of restraint. And, if I may
say so, it requires all those who are in positions of authority in
our different faiths to preach clearly and consistently to others the
eternal value of these Divine attributes.
Some three thousand years ago King Solomon, the son of David,
said, "Where there is no vision, the people perish". I can only say
that I look forward to a world in which we share a vision that
acknowledges our differences with respect and understanding; that
recognises what others hold sacred – and to a world in which we see
that we cannot, and must not, abuse our great traditions and their
teachings as a weapon in the service of selfish, worldly power.
I have no illusions about the difficulty of this task. But I believe
it is one which now, above all times, we must undertake, and
undertake together. There is no other way to preserve the innermost
values of our faiths which we hold most dear. We must work together
to create a world in which the fruits of faith – understanding,
tolerance and compassion – enrich and safeguard the world of our
children, and our children’s children. We must not let slip this
opportunity and this challenge in an age which requires our
determined, committed and heartfelt efforts to live in peace together.
