WITH eminent academics such as Professor David Betz of King’s College London warning that the United Kingdom is close to civil war, questions have to be asked about how and why that might be the case.
There are three parties involved in this struggle: the liberal elite, the ordinary indigenous British population and Islam (through unlimited immigration).
The liberal elite have, for reasons that are still a little opaque, underwritten and organised high levels of Islamic immigration, not just in Great Britain, but throughout Europe. Such mass migration has reached the point of destabilising civil society and is changing its religious as well as its political character. It could be argued that this is the experiment of multiculturalism which has got out of control, or that it was intended to solve the pensions and demographic crises afflicting the West.
The difficulty is that the experiment has been undertaken without democratic permission, against the will of the people, and this brings us closer to civil conflagration.
Who is to represent the ordinary indigenous population when the governing elites turn against them? Might not the monarch have a role to play in protecting, defending or advocating on behalf of the people? Might not the monarch, as Defender of the Faith, enter the public debate to restrain the government and defend the British people and their cultural and religious patrimony?
That might be the case if the monarch saw himself as Defender of the Faith. The term is defined for him by constitutional literature and precedent. The faith he has promised to defend is the Protestant faith, established by law in the shape of the Church of England.
The problem is that King Charles III, when he was Prince of Wales, gave notice that he does not understand faith in that way. He wishes to be defender of all the faiths, and has shown himself to be an admirer of, and benignly influenced by, Islam.
The King’s opinions have been shaped by a school of theological thought that describes the three Abrahamic faiths as forming a trio of ‘cousins’. The understanding is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have more in common than that which separates them, and can be taken together as a collective monotheism.
There are several insurmountable theological difficulties to this view. The first is that the nature of God in both Judaism and Christianity is essentially personal; embryonically, one might say, in Judaism, but which reaches its full articulation in the incarnation, where God shows his human face as Jesus, the Logos. This is anathema to Muhammad. To Muslims, Allah is unknowable in a personal sense. The proper relationship is one of submission rather than intimacy.
Furthermore, although the figures borrowed by Muhammad from Judaism and Christianity have the same names as one finds in the Bible, they have very different characters and speak with very different voices in the Koran, as if they were indeed different people.
More intensely problematic are passages in the Koran, seen as authoritative, which invite the destruction of Jews (no longer cousins in the Koranic text) in fidelity to Allah. (‘Kill “the Jews” wherever you come upon them and drive them out of the places from which they have driven you out’ – Surah Al-Baqarah, 191-193).
The sudden explosion in anti-Semitism, both in this country and throughout the West, appears to be directly related to the size of Islamic influence within the body politic. Increasingly, MPs will be elected solely on the vexed question of the Palestinian determination to drive all Jews out of the Middle East ‘from the river to the sea’, which in practice can take the form only of a genocide of Jews.
And what about the relationship between Christian culture and Islam? We are clearly faced with two views. One is that Islam and Christianity are incompatible. The other is that they are complementary. The difficulty is that we can’t find any time or place in history where such complementarity has found fruition.
Over the last 30 years a great deal of academic investment has been directed towards presenting the period of Islamic rule in Spain, the ‘Convivencia’ or coexistence, as one of mutual enrichment and harmony. But as the powerfully influential book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise by Dario Fernández-Morera (2016), made painfully clear, this was a movement of deep revisionist rewriting funded by enormous sums of Saudi Arabian money channelled through supine Western universities. The documentary evidence of Islamic domination presented a picture, no different from anywhere else where Islam is in the majority, of ruthlessness and Koranic literalism.
So what exactly does King Charles III think? In 1993 the then Prince of Wales made a significant speech at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in which he lamented the Western failure to understand Islam, and praised its contributions to science, philosophy, medicine and spirituality. He said: ‘Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost.’
Muslim thinkers such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian philosopher, Islamic scholar and leading figure in the Traditionalist School, have exercised a profound influence on Charles, especially in the areas of spiritual ecology, interfaith understanding and the defence of sacred tradition. The proposition that lies behind this school of thought is that all major world religions share a perennial truth – a metaphysical and sacred unity. Nasr’s ‘Traditionalist’ view holds that modernity has cut people off from sacred knowledge, which all great religions once preserved.
This outlook offers its adherents a relativistic sense that somehow all the major religions can be synthesised into an impersonal organising resourcing spirit, and that they are all derivative of this more global and universalistic principle.
In this view, Islam becomes an amiable Middle Eastern complement to all other philosophies. One might say that by presenting it in this way, Islam is disguised with a universalistic benevolence that is waiting to be actualised by the more enlightened liberal elite. Yet when Islam gains dominance in any society, it does so with the intention of implementing the Koran and usually with a commitment to Sharia law.
Neither Islam nor Christianity in their orthodox forms accept the sophisticated relativistic overview advanced by academics. But King Charles is deeply committed to it, and consequently any allegiance he might have had to Christian culture or to the Church is diluted to the point of being unrecognisable.
The worldview that the King has adopted appears to restrict the role he might play to that of an advocate for a benign version of Islam that exists more in the imagination of the relativistic elite than it does anywhere on the ground.
There is a liberal presumption that assumes that all religions, including Islam, are moving inevitably towards a relativistic synthesis that demonstrates a preference for a liberal mindset in spirituality as well as politics and philosophy. Islam shows no sign of giving way to this liberal mindset (as some aspects of Protestant Christianity have done). Quite the contrary.
Christians find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. History teaches them that their only choices when faced with a resurgent Islam (spiritually or demographically) are violent self-defence (the Crusades and Spain), submission (all those areas of the world that were once Christian but are now Muslim), or determined and successful evangelisation of Muslims.
King Charles might have been more faithful to the vows of his coronation, and more use in securing a safe and stable future for his people, if he had not looked affectionately on Islam through the impractical and historically unlikely lens of relativistic synthesis, and become what to many seems to be an unwelcome and implausible devotee of Islam.
Many look at the prospect of a deepening clash between liberalism, Christianity and Islam in these islands with increasing anxiety. There is a real risk that harmony might eventually be achieved only by religious partitioning (with overtones of the history of Lebanon) but Professor Betz sees the path towards that outcome mired first by much violence and civic unrest.
