Britain, we now know, has a new monarch. And, we think, the world has a new hope. Especially the divided worlds of the West and Islam.
The reason is King Charles III, though schooled in the Western way of seeing the world, comes across as someone who understands, or at least seeks to understand, Islam's worldview.
For sure, we do not know what is in the monarch's heart. No man can. But a speech he delivered on Oct 27, 1993 as Prince of Wales on "Islam and the West" at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, England, tells of a royal who sees the need for others, especially those in the West, to understand Islam.
To the prince, "misunderstandings arise when others fail to appreciate how others look at the world, its history, and our respective roles in it". How true.
Not only Westerners misunderstand Muslims, but Muslims also misunderstand Westerners. The Prince of Wales advised the two communities then, and we think, he would do the same as King Charles III, to look "for that which binds our two worlds together" because it "is so much more powerful than that which divides us". Muslims, Christians and Jews are "people of the Book", he said, quoting a phrase from the Quran.
He is right. People of the Book share "a belief in one divine God, in the transience of our earthly life, in our accountability for our actions and in the assurance of the life to come". Key values, too, are common: respect for knowledge, for justice, compassion for the poor and underprivileged, and respect for parents.
So why the great divide? In the prince's words: "14 centuries too often marked by mutual hostility that has given rise to an enduring tradition of fear and distrust, because our two worlds have seen that past in contradictory ways." Consider the Crusades.
To the Westerners, they were a series of heroic exploits by Europe to wrest Jerusalem from "wicked Muslim infidels". To Muslims, they were episodes of cruel atrocities and terrible plunder by "Western infidel soldiers, perhaps exemplified best by the massacres committed by the Crusaders when, in 1099, they took back Jerusalem, the third holiest city in Islam".
The list of conflicts over the past 1,400 years is long, but as the prince said, those days of conflicts are over. Yet Islam is still seen as a threat by the West. Because, to the prince, the way the West understands Islam "has been hijacked by the extreme and the superficial".
This, to the prince, is a serious mistake. We can't agree more. "It is like judging the quality of life in Britain by the existence of murder and rape, child abuse and drug addiction." We must not, the prince went on to say, be tempted to believe that extremism is the hallmark of the Muslim. "Extremism is no more the monopoly of Islam than it is the monopoly of other religions, including Christianity." Islam, as the future monarch remarked, is "the religion of the middle way".
The Prince of Wales was trying hard to bridge the two worlds of the West and Islam. Now, as King Charles III, we hope he will do the same.