The Trouble With Prince Charles

Christopher Hitchens on the pseudo-intellectual anti-science quackery of HRH Prince Charles:

A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own. And, as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience. I quote from a recent document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the imposition of sharia, which has been very active in London mosques and in the infiltration of local political parties. “The primary work” in the establishment of a future Muslim empire, it announces, “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”

Prince Charles’ is whistling in the dark if he thinks his half-baked misapprehension of “traditionalism” is ever going to usher in a new Golden Age. This is a period in the future when it is hoped Europe’s ‘spiritual crisis’ will be reversed by the re-installation of a high-caste kshatriya super-nobility whose glory will be attended to by a devoted clerical class of brahman spiritual elite, a lá the ‘Perennialist’ fantasies of the protofascist, Julius Evola. But the problem boils down to the fact that Charles has no inkling, or is wilfully ignorant, of the difference between a sheikh of the Shadhiliyyah Darqawi order and an oily, on-the-make Jamaat-e-Islami rabble rouser.

Hitchens is right. The type of muslim supporter Charles’ attracts nowadays is not so much “spiritual elite” as “clerical fascist”. Inayat Bunglawala for example:

The Prince does come in for a fair amount of criticism, but as far as work with faith communities goes, he has done sterling work over many years and is well respected in return and rightly so.

The “sterling work” by Prince Charles which Bunglawala is gushing about is this kind of thing. In other words, his work with “faith communities” is, amongst other things, granting his royal endorsement to the the IFE and the Jamaat-e-Islam embedded in the East London Mosque.

Ansar Ahmed Ullah, another local opponent of the IFE, says that local people are frustrated with the way in which the white political establishment has endorsed and legitimised a mosque whose true nature they do not appear to understand. “We have told them many times about these people,” he says. “But you still get people like Boris Johnson, government ministers and Prince Charles going down there. People see that, and it gives them credibility.”