In the main London Mosque the accession of the Islam-friendly Charles III, was celebrated with prayers and the singing of God Save the King, to the shock of many millions of Muslims around the world.
“The truth about Charles is that he is a committed Islamophile. He has studied the Quran and even started learning Arabic to further that end. He is a fan of Martin Lings’ (Abu Bakr Siraj al-Din’s) acclaimed biography of the Prophet Muhammad.”
But Yahya Birt, Research Director at the Ayaan Institute in London and a community historian, felt he had to draw attention to less admirable facts.
“For years, the Royal Family and Charles in particular sold millions of pounds’ worth of military hardware in the Arabian Gulf, and the monarchy will be used to front future trade deals with autocrats with a penchant for the romance of royalty.”
“So, my final plea to British Muslims is not to be easily charmed by Charles and rush unthinkingly for the photo, career and funding opportunities and the imperial gongs at the crowning of a new Islamophilic monarch.”
Muslims of this present generation seem to consider that Islam is new in the Western political sphere since the War on Terror and the Satanic Verses.
That is far from the truth.
The time of the first two kings by the name of Charles was also a time of upheaval worse than the horrors of Brexit and the covid pandemic. It saw the worst conflict ever upon British soil with some 600,000 killed in the Civil War and the disease which accompanied it.
It witnessed the execution of King Charles I for treason in 1649 and the Commonwealth Republic from 1649 to 1660 under Cromwell.
The Trial of King Charles I. Image source: https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/
Rule by Divine Right, the orthodoxy of James I and Charles I, where the will of the king was law, received a fatal blow.
The restored monarch, Charles II in 1660, behaved like a Divine Right ruler but was very nervous about Parliament’s role.
At his sudden death his brother James II, also a devotee of Divine Right, succeeded to the throne but was challenged by those who saw that a Catholic monarchy would result in persecution of Protestants.
The Exclusion Movement, to prevent James from taking power, occurred at the same time as the Protestants of Hungary began to resist the imposition of the rule of Divine Right Catholic Hapsburgs upon their country.
Garcia in “Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670-1840,” traces the roots of modern British constitutional history to the Tecklelite politics of that time.
Count Teckely, fearing Hapsburg rule and intolerance would be imposed upon his people, preferred the Ottomans.
“Teckely accepted Ottoman-Islamic law in order to protect Protestant Hungary’s constitutional right to free worship, clerical independence, and national sovereignty.”
Teckely became the “Protestant Mahometan terrorist” for the seventeenth century Tories.
They equated resistance to the Catholic James II to Count Teckely’s resistance to the Catholic Hapsburgs.
Tories produced propaganda claiming that those Protestants who were resisting the Catholic king were actually in a radical international conspiracy with the Muslims.
“Allegedly, these infidels plan to overthrow Christendom, renew the English Civil War, and welcome an Ottoman invasion .. ” [Garcia p. 31]
These “Protestant Mahometans” were linked to the English Whigs, rivals to the Tories and eventual authors of the Bill of Rights which established the constitutional monarchy as a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The Second Carolingian Era ended with successful Islamic theoretical influence over the resistance to Divine Right Catholic Monarchy and the Protestant Mahometans Islamic ideas helped usher in the era of constitutional monarchy.
The old claim epitomised by Louis XIV “L’etat, c’est moi”[ I am the state], died.
The Third Carolingian Era in Britain under an Islamophile king, perhaps not in Australia as it moves towards republicanism, may prove even more productive than that.
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