Prince Charles' Speech at Wilton Park
The Prince of Wales explains how the Muslim critique of materialism
helped him to rediscover the sacred Islamic spirituality and the decline
of the West.
I start from the belief that Islamic civilisation at its best,
like many of the religions of the East - Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, and
Buddhism - has an important message for the West in the way it has
retained an integrated and integral view of the sanctity of the
world around us. I feel that we in the West could be helped to
rediscover the roots of our own understanding by an appreciation of the
Islamic tradition's deep respect for the timeless traditions of the
natural order.
I believe that process could help in the task of bringing our
two faiths closer together. It could also help us in the West to
rethink, and for the better, our practical stewardship of man and his
environment - in fields such as health-care, the natural environment and
agriculture, as well as in architecture and urban planning.
Modern materialism is unbalanced and increasingly damaging in
its long-term consequences. Yet nearly all the great religions of the
world have held an integral view of the sanctity of the world. The
Christian message with, for example, its deeply mystical and symbolic
doctrine of the Incarnation, has been traditionally a message of the
unity of the worlds of spirit and matter, and of God's manifestation
in this world and in mankind.
But during the past three centuries, in the Western world at
least, a dangerous division has occurred in the way we perceive the
world around us. Science has tried to assume a monopoly - even a tyranny
- over our understanding. Religion and science have become separated, so
that now, as Wordsworth said, "Little we see in nature that is ours".
Science has attempted to take over the natural world
from God; it has fragmented the cosmos and relegated the sacred to a
separate and secondary compartment of our understanding, divorced from
practical, day to day existence.
We are only now beginning to gauge the disastrous results. We
in the Western world seem to have lost a sense of the wholeness of our
environment, and of our immense and inalienable responsibility to the
whole of creation. This has led to an increasing failure to appreciate
or understand tradition and the wisdom of our forebears, accumulated
over the centuries. Indeed tradition is positively
discriminated against - as if it were some socially unacceptable
disease.
In my view, a more holistic approach is needed now. Science
has done the inestimable service of showing us a world much more complex
than we ever imagined. But in its modern, materialist, one-dimensional
form, it cannot explain everything. God is not merely the ultimate
Newtonian mathematician or the mechanistic clockmaker. As science and
technology have become increasingly separated from ethical, moral, and
sacred considerations, so the implications of such a separation have
become more sombre and horrifying - as we see in genetic manipulation or
in the consequences of the kind of scientific arrogance so blatant in
the scandal of BSE.
I have always felt that tradition is not a man-made element in
our lives, but a God-given intuition of natural rhythms, of the
fundamental harmony that emerges from the union of the paradoxical
opposites that exist in every aspect of nature. Tradition reflects the
timeless order of the cosmos, and anchors us into an awareness of the
great mysteries of the universe, so that, as Blake put it, we can see
the whole universe in an atom and eternity in a moment. That is why I
believe Man is so much more than just a biological phenomenon resting on
what we now seem to define as "the bottom line" of the great balance
sheet of life, according to which art and culture are seen increasingly
as optional extras in life.
This view is quite contrary, for example, to the outlook of
the Muslim craftsman or artist, who is never concerned with display for
its own sake, nor with progressing ever forward in his own ingenuity,
but is content to submit a man's craft to God. That outlook reflects, I
believe, the memorable passage in the Koran,"whithersoever you turn
there is the face of God and God is all-embracing, all knowing". While
appreciating that this essential innocence has been destroyed, and
destroyed everywhere, I nevertheless believe that the survival of
civilised values, as we have inherited them from our ancestors, depends
on the corresponding survival in our hearts of that profound sense of
the sacred and the spiritual.
Traditional religions, with their integral view of the
universe, can help us to rediscover the importance of the integration of
the secular and the sacred. The danger of ignoring this essential aspect
of our existence is not just spiritual or intellectual. It also lies at
the heart of the great divide between the Islamic and Western worlds
over the place of materialism in our lives. In those instances where
islam chooses to reject Western materialism, this is not, my view, a
political affectation or the result of envy or a sense of inferiority.
Quite the opposite. And the danger that the gulf between the worlds of
Islam and the other Eastern religions on the one hand and the West on
the other will grow ever wider and more unbridgeable is real, unless we
can explore together practical ways of integrating the sacred and the
secular in both our cultures in order to provide a true inspiration for
the next century.
Islamic culture in its traditional form has striven to
preserve this integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have
not seen fit to do in recent generations in the West. There is much we
can learn from that Islamic world view in this respect. There are many
ways in which mutual understanding and appreciation can be built.
Perhaps, for instance, we could begin by having more Muslim teachers in
British schools, or by encouraging exchanges of teachers. Everywhere in
the world people want to learn English. But in the West, in turn, we
need to be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn with our hearts, as
well as our heads. The approaching millennium may be the ideal catalyst
for helping to explore and stimulate these links, and I hope we shall
not ignore the opportunity this gives us to rediscover the
spiritual underpinning of our entire existence.
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