Prince Charles

Michael Gove has a good piece in the Times on Charles’ latest travels:

Prince Charles’s trips to Saudi are only the most visible evidence of his interest in a state where public displays of Christianity are impossible, while women are denied the right to drive, walk alone in public, dress as they wish or follow the profession they choose. He has fêted Saudi royals and businessmen, inviting them to dinner at Highgrove and supporting their sponsorship of educational ventures.

One wonders whether the Prince has ever used his close relationship to inquire into Saudi funding of suicide bombing in the Middle East? Or has he questioned Saudi support for extremist madrassas across the Islamic world? Might he even have taken his Saudi friends to task for their countrymen’s habit of buying off fundamentalism in their own country by providing it with the funds to wreak havoc elsewhere?

I suspect not. In a speech he gave in 1993, to mark the opening of the Saudi-funded Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, the Prince went out of his way to see only the best in the Islamic world, arguing that it had retained an “integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen fit to do in recent generations in the West”. He went on to say, “There is much we can learn from that Islamic world view in this respect”.

The Islamic world has an “integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen fit to do in recent generations in the West”. Well, that’s one way of putting it.