The first female Archbishop of Canterbury in more than 1,400 years kicked off Friday’s awards with a characteristically woke speech.
Standing at a lectern in Lambeth Palace’s magnificent Great Hall, Sarah Mullally told assembled guests that ‘we live in a world that is not always as we wish it would be’, owing to a combination of ‘injustice’, poverty, starvation and what she called the ‘climate emergency’.
Thankfully, she continued, there are those among us who are ‘determined to make a difference, determined to be hope in this world’. And they were the exact people she was about to celebrate.
The Lambeth Awards, whose recipients are chosen each autumn by the Archbishop, are among the most prestigious honours the Church of England can bestow.
Previous winners have ranged from Queen Elizabeth to Pope Francis, and usually include a selection of vicars, former bishops, and notable politicians who have ‘made extraordinary contributions to the Anglican Communion and wider society’.
This year, the list included one individual who very much stood out from the crowd.
His name was Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, a 68-year-old Pakistani cleric. According to the Church, he was given the ‘Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Co-operation’, for having allegedly promoted harmonious relationships between different religious groups.
Pictures of Friday’s ceremony show him posing beside Mullally, who looks faintly uncomfortable, and two other women in the 13th century banqueting hall.
Pakistani cleric Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi poses with his wife beside Mullally, who looks faintly uncomfortable, and another unidentified woman in the 13th century banqueting hall
The cleric’s remarks about Bin Laden are in keeping with a host of provocative and intolerant statements he’s shared over the years, many of which have achieved the exact opposite of promoting interfaith harmony
One is dressed head-to-toe in a niqab, the restrictive Islamic veil that covers a woman’s entire head aside from her eyes. She is described as Ashrafi’s ‘wife’, though the Church of England’s photo captions failed to extend the courtesy of identifying her by name.
The other, who appeared to be wearing a head covering and a black Covid face mask, has not been identified at all.
For an Archbishop who likes to describe herself as a ‘feminist,’ and has pledged to ‘speak out on misogyny’, it made for a curious and perhaps rather awkward tableau. In fact, the whole thing prompted a minor kerfuffle on social media, where images of the occasion were soon posted.
Yet commentary about the attire of Mullally’s guests was nothing compared to the row that broke out yesterday when the Tory MP Nick Timothy dug up a series of highly provocative comments that Ashrafi had made about Osama bin Laden over the years.
The cleric, who was handed his gong on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, turns out to be an old acquaintance and sometime fan of the jihadist.
Specifically, Ashrafi, who once told the BBC that he had met Bin Laden ‘many times’, gave him the honorific title of ‘Saifullah, or Sword of God’ in 2007. This was in response to the Government’s decision to knight Salman Rushdie.
Explaining the move, Ashrafi told the AFP news agency: ‘We are pleased to award the title of Saifullah to Osama bin Laden after the British government’s decision to bestow the title of “Sir” on blasphemer Rushdie. This is the highest title for a Muslim warrior.’
In an interview with Reuters, he added: ‘If a blasphemer can be given the title “Sir” by the West… then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah.’ Quite how a man who made such remarks (and has since failed to renounce them) ended up being honoured by the Archbishop of Canterbury for services to interfaith harmony is anyone’s guess.
After stonewalling questions for several hours, Lambeth Palace said yesterday lunchtime that it was ‘urgently reviewing this matter’. Just before 6.30pm, the award was unceremoniously withdrawn.
So ended a turgid day for the newly minted Archbishop and her team, who appear not to have done the slightest due diligence before inviting Mr Ashrafi to London to accept her achingly fashionable award.
The cleric’s remarks about Bin Laden are, after all, entirely in keeping with a host of other provocative and at times deeply intolerant remarks he’s shared over the years, many of which have achieved the exact opposite of promoting interfaith harmony.
We know this because he has for decades chaired Pakistan’s all-male Ulema Council of Muslim scholars, which issues pronouncements regarding whether specific customs and government policies are compatible with Islamic law.
Thanks to the power and influence this role affords, Ashrafi is frequently invited on the country’s TV and radio stations, and transcripts of his regular press conferences are often shared via the government’s official PR department.
To get a taste of his world view, one need only wind the clock back to March, when the Iran war kicked off.
At a conference, the cleric shared an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the US and Israeli missile strikes were part of a plot to eventually take control of his own country. ‘Under the cover of Iran, the target of the Jews and Christians is nuclear-armed Pakistan,’ he said, before praising Iran’s ‘mujahideen’, or religious warriors, who were ‘standing like a wall of lead against Jews and Christians’.
‘Islam permits the husband to marry four times and he does not need permission for it,’ Ashrafi previously told reporters. He is seen here meeting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
According to the Times of Karachi, he also described the assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei, a despotic theocrat who ran one of the world’s most repressive states and was responsible for the death of tens of thousands of his own citizens, as a ‘martyr’.
The rhetoric was in keeping with Ashrafi’s response to 2023’s October 7 attacks, in which Hamas terrorists murdered roughly 1,200 civilians and gang-raped, sexually tortured and mutilated hundreds of Israeli women. On the day of the attacks, he appeared on BOL, a Pakistani TV news network, to declare the whole thing entirely justified.
‘Hamas’s response is an answer to Israel’s atrocities. Israel has been continuously desecrating Al-Aqsa Mosque,’ he said. And added in a second interview: ‘Allah crushed the pride of Israel through the Palestinian freedom fighters.’
Again, this hardly promotes ‘interfaith co-operation’. But Ashrafi’s hostility to the world’s only Jewish state runs deep. In 2022, he demanded the Pakistani prime minister hold an inquiry into reports that a delegation of his country’s businessmen had taken part in a trade trip to Jerusalem, calling for ‘strict legal action against not only those who have visited Israel but those who gave permission in this regard’, accusing them of having ‘hurt the hearts of the Muslim Ummah [community]’.
On the domestic front, he’s also a vocal supporter of conservative and some might say highly repressive laws regarding women’s rights.
In 2022, he supported the closure of a breast milk ‘bank’ set up to help young mothers in Karachi, declaring it ‘un-Islamic’. And in 2021, he endorsed remarks by Pakistan’s prime minister to the effect that women who neglected to wear the hijab were encouraging men to rape them: ‘If a woman is wearing very few clothes it will have an impact on men unless they are robots.’
During a press conference, Ashrafi described the hijab remark as ‘legal and in accordance with Holy Quran’, said the API news agency.
While the cleric has just one wife, he has also spoken out in support of bigamy. In March 2014, for example, his Council of Islamic Ideology declared a Pakistani law requiring a man’s first wife to provide consent for him to marry a second, third or fourth woman was un-Islamic.
‘Islam permits the husband to marry four times and he does not need permission for it,’ Ashrafi told reporters.
‘Islam clearly says that a man can marry more than once if he treats all his wives fairly.’
Again, what Archbishop Mullally makes of this view is anyone’s guess. As, perhaps, is her opinion regarding Ashrafi’s robust views regarding anyone who has the temerity to criticise his religion.
The cleric is a vigorous supporter of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, which stipulate the death penalty for critics of Islam.
In 2020, he spoke out in support of the arrest of 100 clerics belonging to different religious sects, with reports saying he ‘supported the arrest of all those who commit blasphemy of sacred Muslim figures’.
Ashrafi has also long campaigned for such rules to be exported overseas, telling a press conference in 2023: ‘We hope the European Union will pay attention to the crucial issue and there will be legislation at the international level in this regard.’
In 2015, he responded to the murder of 12 journalists from the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo – which had published images of the Prophet Mohammed – in a staggeringly tasteless fashion, by chairing a meeting in Lahore, which ‘declared the publication of blasphemous sketches by a French journal terrorism and demanded the United Nations enact an international law linking the freedom of expression with respect for religions’.
Those remarks were, it must be stressed, made two weeks after the magazine’s staff members had been murdered by a pair of armed Islamist terrorists.
Some might regard that as ugly. Not so the Archbishop of Canterbury, judging by her decision to honour Ashrafi for being ‘the hope in the world’.
Back in 2013, the cleric meanwhile gave a TV interview suggesting, in the words of contemporary reports, that ‘suicide attacks in Afghanistan are lawful because Nato troops are invaders who have occupied the country’.
After the remarks sparked international condemnation he told a news agency that his comments had been ‘taken out of context’ and he considered suicide bombing to be un-Islamic.
In fairness to Ashrafi, and indeed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he has at times taken positions that (by the at times medieval standards of Pakistan) are faintly progressive, for example speaking out against forced marriage, child marriage, forced conversion to Islam and honour killings.
He has also endorsed women’s rights, up to a point. In a 2022 speech, he reassured fellow citizens that ‘there is no need for women to be confined within the four walls of the house’.
One such woman is of course his wife, who was allowed to travel to London with him to accept last Friday’s award.
Pictures of the ceremony show the (un-named) woman standing between Mullally and Ashrafi.
Whether her presence reflects the cleric’s reluctance to accept an award directly from a female Archbishop is unclear, since Lambeth Palace is refusing to comment on the logistical arrangements surrounding the whole thing.
Neither has it commented on what (aside from misplaced political correctness) motivated the Archbishop to stick him on her list of award recipients.
All we can say, with reasonable certainty, is that very little basic research was carried out before inviting a fan of Osama bin Laden to a ceremony scheduled for September 11.
And so the Church of England finds itself in yet another PR crisis it can ill afford.
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