A Medal for Brass
Shea, Nina
A Medal for Brass A brazen publicity stunt brought to you by the House of Saud. BY NINA SHEA Already dogged by a reputation for promoting religious extremism abroad and repression at home, the...
...The latest Saudi publicity stunt should not be dismissed as merely a boorish hoax...
...Georgetown shares in largesse to fund Islamic studies programs...
...The recent ad directly supports this power play...
...It was given to White House offi cials when Pope Benedict met with Bush...
...On May 8, Saudi royals placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Times of London, and other papers proclaiming that a charity founded by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud, a nephew of King Abdullah and the world’s 13th-richest person, had been honored by the pope...
...Nor does any great service to the Church fi gure among the benefactions for which Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal is best known— the check to New York City famously refused by Mayor Giuliani after 9/11...
...The Saudi monarchy has begun using the model of the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church to position itself as the authoritative voice of Islam worldwide...
...This is a bit like portraying an Oval Offi ce photo op as the awarding of a Presidential Medal of Freedom...
...Some on Capitol Hill agreed...
...Using its control of the hajj and the vast wealth it pours into foreign evangelism, funding mosques, schools, libraries, and academic centers worldwide, the House of Saud is patiently pursuing its quest to make the Saudi variant of Islam—Wahhabism, with its warrant for the murder of heretics, apostates, and infi dels—the Muslim norm...
...Representative Frank Wolf, ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee for the State Department, home of the Foreign Service, took up the issue with Georgetown president John DeGioia...
...It is minted each year by the thousand and handed out as a memento to those granted an audience with the pope...
...Directly under a Koranic passage on tolerance, the headline declared: “Alwaleed bin Talal Humanitarian Foundation, representing Kingdom Foundation, awarded the Pontifi cal Medal by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican...
...Most Google hits for “Pontifical Medal” were Arabic papers’ echoes of the very PR material presented in the ad...
...the gifts to the Carter Center and the presidential library of George H.W...
...The center is controversial...
...Meanwhile, Saudi subsidizing of Western universities proceeds apace...
...It confers no honor at all...
...Perhaps Prince Talal came by the medallion through his aunt, the vice president of his Beirut-based foundation, which has been generous to Lebanese Catholics...
...In a February 14 letter, Wolf asked whether the center could maintain “the impartiality and integrity of scholarship that befi ts so distinguished a university as Georgetown and that is required by the exigencies of national security for training American offi cials...
...But if the ad’s immediate purpose may have been to cast the appearance of a papal blessing over the growing Saudi presence on Western campuses, it also served a larger Saudi aim...
...A search of the Holy See’s website turned up nothing...
...the donations to universities like Harvard and Georgetown which now boast “Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Centers” for Islamic studies...
...In the end, it was consultations with an independent expert on the Vatican and interviews with several recipients that solved the mystery: The medal shown in the ad is a common souvenir...
...All the staffers at the American embassy to the Holy See, for instance, have received it...
...But then, what was going on...
...Neither the American mainstream press nor the Catholic press had reported any papal decoration of a Saudi prince...
...Take that coat of arms...
...It sets up visual parallels between the pope and the king, the Vatican and Mecca...
...In the history of Sunni Islam, theological authority has been located in various centers, but never in the House of Saud...
...Besides, why would the Vatican confer a high honor on this Saudi prince...
...It offers a useful glimpse of the ambitions and methods of the Saudi state, which deserve to be taken seriously...
...All of this seemed unlikely on its face...
...The ad specifi cally mentions Georgetown’s now-renamed Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for MuslimChristian Understanding, as if it were somehow covered by the pope’s purported commendation...
...And offi cial listings of the honors awarded by the Vatican— knighthoods in the Orders of St...
...This is the ad’s chilling subtext...
...Bush...
...Thus, in 2005, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal gave $20 million to Georgetown University for a center within its Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service...
...The ad labels it “The Vatican,” a term never used by the Holy See to identify itself...
...Nina Shea is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom...
...The implication is that Saudi Arabia is not only hallowed ground as host of the two holiest Muslim sites, but also the arbiter of Islamic orthodoxy...
...More fundamentally, no church has yet been permitted in Saudi Arabia, a point the pope pressed with King Abdullah at a fi rst-of-its-kind meeting last November...
...What can have prompted such reckless misrepresentation...
...The Holy See’s coat of arms was displayed bottom center, implying that the ad carried the imprimatur of the pope...
...Although the caption claims the picture shows Pope Benedict “awarding the Pontifi cal Medal” to the prince’s aunt “in recognition of her distinguished social and humanitarian work,” an uncropped version of the same picture found online makes clear the two are merely shaking hands...
...It is for sale at the Vatican bookstore...
...Repeated calls to the Vatican embassy and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington and to the Holy See’s press offi ce in Rome brought no clarifi cation...
...Last December, the Washington Times published an article under the headline “Saudis buy a campus presence...
...Gregory the Great and the Holy Sepulcher, for example—made no mention of the medal shown...
...As is their custom, Saudi rulers have responded with a public relations campaign...
...In 2006, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, in a letter to the U.S...
...A Catholic knighthood normally requires a recommendation from the local bishop, and Saudi Arabia tolerates no “local” bishops or Christian clergy of any kind...
...On March 12, she met the pope in Rome, and a photograph of their encounter appears in the ad...
...Noting that Harvard, Duke, and Berkeley were also benefi ciaries of Saudi donations, the piece raised concerns that these gifts were “creating bastions of noncritical pro-Islamic scholarship within academia...
...Only this month, Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh each announced the creation of an Islamic studies center funded by and named after Prince Alwaleed bin Talal...
...A slogan at the bottom reads, “Two great faiths, Sharing one cause: humanity...
...Commission on International Religious Freedom, quoted the king as referring to his government as the “Vatican of Islam...
...This is new...
...It’s a campaign built on deception...
...A fair surmise is that the answer lies partly in the royal family’s eagerness to defl ect criticism from Saudi philanthropy in the West...
...At the center of the page was depicted a medallion bearing the image of Pope Benedict XVI, which the ad labeled “The Pontifi cal Medal...
...BY NINA SHEA Already dogged by a reputation for promoting religious extremism abroad and repression at home, the government of Saudi Arabia now faces growing resentment at the soaring price of oil...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 35
