London • Britain’s Prince Charles aims to seek Qatar’s help in the promotion of moderate Islam, besides discussing military cooperation, environmental protection and energy security during his visit to Doha.

Prince Charles, now in Kuwait on a four-day visit, will tour the Gulf states of Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, Hannah Howard, the press secretary to the Prince of Wales, told The Peninsula yesterday.

The visit of the Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla, to Qatar is on behalf of the British government.

“The visit will reinforce Britain’s friendship with key allies at the most senior levels and will advance key British government priorities in the region,” Howard said.

The tour will include extensive meetings with the Ruling Family, religious leaders, military personnel, business leaders and educationalists in Qatar. “In particular we hope to advance the cause of better understanding between our cultures — the world of Islam and the West,” she added.

Prince Charles has made several strong public statements endorsing Islam as the solution to the spiritual and cultural ills of Britain and the West. His public advocacy of Islam appears to go back to 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an edict (fatwa) against Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in his novel The Satanic Verses.

Rather than defend Rushdie’s freedom of speech, Charles reacted to the death decree by reflecting on the positive features that Islam has to offer the spiritually empty lives of his countrymen.

Charles first delivered a major address on Islam on October 27, 1993, at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford where he is a vice patron of the Centre for Islamic Studies.

Charles has travelled extensively in the Muslim world, with recent visits to Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Bangladesh. He has visited Turkey so often that some observers believe that to be the country where his rumoured conversion to Islam took place. In addition, he has visited mosques in the United Kingdom, for example, dropping in on one at the end of Ramadan in April 1996.

Some offices of the British government have found a practical use for the prince’s affection for Islam. In particular, the Foreign Office uses him as a point man for British business interests in Muslim countries, leading one journalist to comment that “the Charles of Arabia phenomenon is here to stay,” for it helps assure British commerce with the Muslim world.

Although some Britons may be bewildered at Prince Charles’s infatuation with Islam, he has become a hero among Muslims. His February 1997 visit to Saudi Arabia got moderate coverage in the British press, but it was huge news in the host country. In Saudi Arabia, the overwhelming theme of the welcoming addresses was of the Prince as candid friend of the Islamic world.

The warmth of his welcome was extraordinary.

The writer of this account, John Casey of Cambridge University, warns that the British public lacks a clear understanding of Charles’s standing in the Muslim world:

The extent to which the Prince is admired by Muslims – even to the point of hero-worship – has not yet sunk into the consciousness of the British public. When it does, that public may or may not be pleased.