More naivety from our Euro friends? Apparently so, this time courtesy the British crown prince.
Britain’s Prince Charles began his visit to Egypt on Monday urging people to bridge the gap between the Western and Islamic worlds even as his own trip to Cairo’s most renowned Islamic institution courted controversy.
“As I’m going to say at Al-Azhar university, I find my heart is incredibly heavy from all the destruction and death that occurs,” Charles told Egypt’s state-owned satellite Nile TV channel, in an interview pre-recorded in London.
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Al-Azhar’s decided to honour Charles for his conciliatory stance during the recent controversy over cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammed, but the move has angered some of the institution’s directors.
“All that Prince Charles did is to say that Islam is the most widespread religion in the world and that’s a reality, not a discovery made by the prince,” Al-Azhar lecturer in Arab literature Abdel Azim al-Mataanni told AFP.
In his interview with Nile TV, Charles touched on the broad issues of attacks carried out by Islamic extremists and the recent wave of violent Muslim and Arab protest over the cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammed.
“I know so well from having experienced the horror of terrorism myself, in losing my beloved great-uncle Lord Mountbatten back in 1979 when he was blown up in a terrorist bomb,” Charles said, invoking the memory of his mentor killed by the IRA.
“I do have some understanding I think, a little, of what people go through with these horrors.”
He pleaded for people on both sides of the Muslim-West divide to find common ground and acknowledge the shared heritage of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Before mentioning Judaism, perhaps Prince Charles should look around Cairo for the apparently-fashionable swastikas. Yes, that’s a sure sign of a fertile common ground.