In 2012 as the Jubilee celebrations began, I was honoured to meet the Queen twice. At Lambeth Palace, three Muslim colleagues and I presented Her Majesty with a decorative frame with Quranic text embroidered on a cloth that had once been used to cover the holiest of Muslim sites, the Kaaba. I met her again shortly afterwards, when she came with the newly-married Duchess of Cambridge to Leicester cathedral to begin her Jubilee tour.
Our meeting came sixty years after the young princess became Queen Elizabeth II, following her coronation in Westminster Abbey with St Edward’s Crown. The service was three hours long and attended by 8,000 guests. It now feels like it belongs to a different age. And of course it does. Britain is a more plural and more secular country than it was in 1953. This has led a number of people to suggest that when the next coronation occurs, a traditional and, in particular, Christian ceremony is no longer appropriate.
As the Chair of the Islamic Society of Britain, you might expect me to agree with those impressions.
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