His Royal Highness Prince Hassan is a keen-eyed, mustached man whose duel Oxford degrees and near-encyclopedic knowledge of European and Middle Eastern history are enough to intimidate the finest journalist. But throughout his multi-tiered arguments, the under-girding realities were clear: what matters at the end of the day is a commitment to the sanctity of human life. We suffer from little nationalisms, from polarizing fundamentalisms (with the caveat, he added, that nothing is religiously fundamental), and breakdowns of governance because of “bad bedside manner”—an inability to relate to people in psychological, linguistically meaningful ways.
“9-11 killed at least a dozen Muslims,” he tells the assembled journalists. “It was an attack on the sanctity of human life, and the prelude to a conflict existential to its protagonists. To protagonists who can’t live without war.
“I ascribe to the Noah Creed. Noah crated the ark to save humanity. Can we build an ark to save our common humanity?”
We must share and elevate religion, not only in what it says but what it does—in our politics and our lives, he suggested. “I say NGO as Non-Governmental Organisms. As humble servants of the Creator, humanity should rise above politics.”
He told a story of taking an American ambassador to see street children in old Amman, and to meet Iraqi children who would sleep in boxes that night, if they could. He expressed worries about children who might be eating off of uranium-depleted plates or playing on contaminated equipment because of Jordan’s policies of importing scrap metal from neighbouring countries. He spoke of legally empowering the poor, of dissuading migration by providing clean drinking water and basic care, and of the “regional commons” of the Middle East—the shared resources and the needs of its people.
He spoke of religious scholars who studied the text of their sibling religions—a facet he said should always be mandatory—and he asked why journalists were embedded with soldiers but scholars were not. And he said whenever people came to the table, the Golden Rule should be paramount, because it is a common message found in most of the world’s prominent religious traditions.
“I don’t believe in ‘interfaith dialogue,’” he said. “Faiths don’t dialogue well, and people will believe what they will believe. It should be a dialogue of adherents of faiths and people of no faith. It should be promoting self-worth for those who haven’t experienced it, and humility for those who promote themselves.”
And he suggested cultural affinity should be used when it can solve problems: Christians should condemn evil in the name of Christ, Muslims evil in the name of Islam, and Jews in the name of Judaism.
