Posted on 03/20/2006 5:09:15 AM PST by Dark Skies
Prince Charles stirred a small controversy in Egypt even before his scheduled arrival in the country Monday, as some Islamic scholars objected to plans to award him an honorary doctorate.
Al-Azhar University has decided to give Prince Charles the award in appreciation of his interest in Islam and his promotion of greater understanding of Islam in the West. The university in Cairo is part of the Al-Azhar complex, the foremost Islamic institution in the Sunni Muslim world.
Several top lecturers at the university say the heir to the British throne does not merit such a high award.
"All that Prince Charles did is to say that Islam is the most widespread religion in the world, and that is a reality, not a discovery by the prince," said Abdel Azim al-Antenna, a lecturer in Arabic literature. "That is not enough for him to receive such a reward from the prestigious Al-Azhar University."
But a director at the university, Abdel Sabur Shahin, supported the award, saying Prince Charles has adopted "positions close to Islam and Muslims, something no one else of his importance has done."
Shahin said the honorary doctorate was intended to "encourage him to befriend Muslims in Great Britain and to support Islam against the obstacles it faces in Europe."
The university plans to bestow the award on Tuesday when the prince will visit the institution and deliver a lecture on the relations between Islam and the West. The grand sheik of Al-Azhar, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the top Islamic cleric in Egypt, will attend the ceremony and make a speech.
The five-day visit by Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, is the first leg of a two-week tour that will take them to Saudi Arabia and India.
Charles, would you kindly get back on your high horse and ride off into irrelevance? Thank you ever so much.
This is true. There is some speculation that Charles, ever the nutcase, adopted a Sufi-like form of Islam sponsored by a European convert group, the Marabittun (sp?), some years ago. Fortunately, being Charles, he probably dropped it and moved on to something even loopier.
. . .yes, they could use some help in removing those obstacles which are slowing the emergence of an Islamic Europe. . .and a little help from friends in 'high places' should be not only cultivated; but appreciated.
And for those of us 'here'; who have not yet noticed a mosque in the neighborhood. . .one is coming soon.
At what point will the 'honorary' Islamic figurehead Prince Charles strap a belt of bombs around his waist and do us all a favor?
What would really be cool is if he blew himself up while receiving his 'honorary' doctorate.
Suspicions swirled around the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for example. So much so that the Duke was conveniently appointed as Governor of the Bahamas where he sat out the war in hot and humid "exile".
One would hope that Charles will be careful of indulging his exotic tastes for certain foreign ideologies more carefully than did the Duke. It may turn up to bite him in his royal posterior some day.
Leni
I agree. I think Charles wants to convert Brittain into a muslim paradise...with himself as king/sultan.
Nazi sympathy was pretty common in the US at that time too - Henry Ford was funding the Nazi party for 16 years before he received his Grand Cross of the German Eagle medal from Hitler in 1938. At the outbreak of war in 1939, Ford-Werke in Germany placed itself at the disposal of the wehrmacht to produce armaments to be used against Britain - allegedly an ally of the US!
Then of course there was Dubya's grandad Prescott, whose Nazi sympathies are well-documented right through to the current son-of-a-nazi dictator (sorry, governor!) of California.
Despite the nazi sympathies of some in Britain, we declared war the same day one of our allies was attacked by the Nazis. It took another two years and an attack by the japs before the US joined the war, so perhaps those nazi sympathies were a lot stronger in the US than in Britain?
Not good news. Of course, it will be even worse when he changes it back to the singular - and the "Faith" in question is Islam. I hope his mother can outlast him.
The British intellectual and upper classes have long had a fascination with/fondness for Islam, for some reason.
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