The death of British Queen Elizabeth II was announced as the weekend in Egypt as in most Muslim countries was just beginning.

The conversation in one family gathering over Friday weekend lunch in a Cairene home turned to new British King Charles III. He was about to be officially proclaimed king, and in the background of the family chatter the TV was set to the news channel BBC World.

“He’s not very persuasive as a king,” a woman in her mid-forties said in English.

But we think we like him, two elderly men, her father-in-law and his brother protested. “I appreciate his work and interest in Islam and Islamic civilisation,” one said.

King Charles’s long veneration of Islam might not have served as tabloid material like other royal news, but his multiple endorsements of Islam and his related patronages over the decades are being reweighed with newfound appreciation in the Arab media now that he is the British Monarch.

“King Charles III: A friend of the Arab world” proclaimed the Saudi English daily Arab News in its 10 September issue.

The piece ran a photograph from 2014 of the new British Monarch wearing traditional Saudi robes and wielding a sword during a visit to the Saudi capital Riyadh, an image reminiscent of the British World War I intelligence officer T E Lawrence who supported the Arab revolt against the former Ottoman Empire.

“He opposed the war on Iraq and learned Arabic: find out about Charles’s relationship with Islam and Arab affairs,” ran a headline on the Qatari Aljazeera TV network on 9 September.

The influential Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat declared that “King Charles III is a lover of Arab culture and an ambassador of inter-faith dialogue.” The Qatari London-based Middle East Eye (MEE) observed that the new British Monarch was “the most pro-Islam monarch in British history.”

“A thoughtful man, he has studied Islam deeply, even going to the lengths of learning Arabic to read the Quran,” wrote the MEE. “The new king is the most Islamophile monarch in British history. The contrast with his [new conservative] government is stark.”

Less than a year ago, the then prince Charles and his wife went on their first overseas tour since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. His chosen destination in November 2021 was Jordan and Egypt.

The two-day visit to Egypt highlighted what could be a summary of his interests: Islam and interfaith dialogue, climate change, and traditional crafts.

After meeting with Ahmed Al-Tayyeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni authority in Islam, the imam published a Facebook post praising the British Royal’s “balanced” Western perspective on Islam and Muslims.

In a nod to this tribute, Nageh Ibrahim, a Muslim scholar, wrote a column explaining Charles’s nuanced position on Islam, a unique posture that stands out amid the mostly negative mainstream Western discourse on the Muslim faith.

The crux of the British Royal’s role in advocating interfaith dialogue, wrote Ibrahim, is his empathy for Islam and the Middle East, especially the empathy he voices in his discourse.

Ibrahim, who said he had been observing Charles for more than 30 years, argued that this man, now head of the Church of England, “appears more knowledgeable than many Muslims about the essence of Islam and more objective than some Arab secularists who regard Islam as a flawed religion.”

Charles was described as “one of the greatest people to have demonstrated deep and empathetic understanding of Islam and the Quran,” even raising false rumours, Ibrahim recalled, that he had converted.

Like most observers of Charles’s growing interest in Islam over the years, Ibrahim paused at the British Monarch’s famous 2010 speech marking the 25th anniversary of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, which he has been a patron of since 1993.

Entitled “Islam and the Environment,” this 50-minute speech at Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre managed to weave a philosophical link between two of Charles’s favourite topics.

He criticised the Western culture’s dominant and mechanistic approach of science over everything else, including religion, which, he suggested, had “de-souled” its worldview. He juxtaposed this with Islam, which “offers a completely integrated view of the Universe where religion and science, mind and matter, are all part of one living, conscious whole.”

“The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity,” he said. “It is both Islam’s noble heritage and a priceless gift to the rest of the world. And yet, so often, that wisdom is now obscured by the dominant drive towards Western materialism – the feeling that to be truly ‘modern’ you have to ape the West.”

But it was Charles’s first speech at the Oxford Centre when it was founded in 1993, which, he later admitted, “struck a chord” and not just in the UK. Entitled “Islam and the West,” Charles, then 44, refuted the “clash of civilisations” thesis that had spread from the West to the Arab countries and had caused much intellectual deliberation in Egypt.

In his speech, Charles contended that the West views Islam unfairly through “extreme” events that happen in the Middle East, such as civil wars and bombings by extremist groups. This has “grossly distorted” Western judgements of Islam by taking extremes to be the norm, he said.

He defended Sharia Law, interpretations of Islamic principles legally enshrined in some Muslim countries, against “unthinking prejudices” that the British press “loves to peddle”.

In his nuanced refuting of such biases, Charles presented a detailed and informative lecture on the history of Islam and Islamic civilisation that seemed on a par with the discourse of some of the Arab world’s prominent Islamic intellectuals who were engaging in the same debate at that time.

A biography, Charles at Seventy: Thoughts, Hopes and Dreams, published in 2018 by British commentator Robert Jobson, offers insights into some of the new monarch’s political views.

According to Jobson, Charles privately disagreed with France and Belgium’s ban on the niqab (the head-to-toe covering preferred by some Muslim women), seeing it as “an infringement of human rights” that “criminalises women” rather than challenging the custom.

Charles privately opposed the 2003 war on Iraq and Britain’s involvement in it. The book describes the weekly meetings between then British prime minister Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth ahead of the war as “a real battlefield between prince Charles and Tony Blair,” with Charles opposing the war and specifically the lack of intelligence to justify the invasion.

The author, who worked on the book with Charles’s office, says the prince thought Blair “behaved like Bush’s ‘poodle’ and said so.”

“He told political figures and those in his trusted circle that he regarded the [US president George] Bush administration as “terrifying” and pilloried what he believed was Blair’s “lack of perspicacity,” according to Jobson.

Charles’s first official visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel was in 2020. In a brief speech in Bethlehem, he referred to the historic Christian-Muslim co-existence in the city.

He told his Palestinian audience that “it breaks my heart to see so much suffering and division.” No one arriving in Bethlehem could “miss the signs of hardship and the situation you face,” he said, alluding to the Israeli occupation, without naming it.

The queen’s death has prompted the Israeli press to draw attention to the fact that during her long reign and global travels she never set foot in Israel, although she visited other countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

Charles paid an unofficial visit in January 2020, where he addressed the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem and toured the old city of Jerusalem but did not meet with Israeli officials. However, he met with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in the Occupied West Bank.

An editorial in the Jerusalem Post on 12 September proclaimed that the “UK’s King Charles should visit Israel.”

It is assumed, the editorial said, that the reason the Royal Family in the past avoided Israel was in large part due to “concerns by the British foreign office about a possible Arab backlash and maybe also due to resentment over the violence that marked the end of the British Mandate here.”

Charles has avoided voicing political views in public, and even his biography, which recalled the Iraq War, steers away from revealing his thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But even the smallest gestures and expressions of sympathy might illuminate hints of his political leanings.

In his 2021 November visit to Jordan, Charles gave his support to the Hashemite custodianship of the Muslim Holy Places in Jerusalem since 1924, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site. His backing of the Jordanian Monarch came at a time when Amman feared warming Israel-Saudi relations might threaten its hold on the Holy Places.

“His majesty’s role as custodian of the holy sites in Jerusalem is a vital element in the search for peace in the region,” Charles said.

The School of Traditional Arts that was founded in 2004 by the then prince Charles in London helped to kick start the reconstruction of the historic minbar (pulpit) of Salaheddin (Saladin) in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

A Christian fanatic burned the pulpit, a magnificent example of Islamic art, in 1969. Its restoration triggered research into mediaeval Islamic art, and as the custodian of the Holy Places the Jordanian Royal Family sponsored a new College for Traditional Islamic Art and Architecture to recreate the historic pulpit in the absence of records documenting its original construction or the craft skills needed to restore it.

The college was based on the School of Traditional Arts in London, then the only school in the world that taught Islamic art based on Islamic principles.

The pulpit was finally restored in 2007, and the story of its restoration was recorded in a documentary, Stairway to Heaven, and a book, The Minbar of Saladin.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 15 September, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.