To misquote Mrs Merton: "What first made you realise, archbishop, that it wasn't such a great idea to have awarded a prize for interfaith work to a supporter of Osama bin Laden?"
The answer, of course, is that neither Sarah Mullally or any of her team thought they need bother with too much checking when they found a Pakistani Muslim who had, according to Lambeth Palace, shown “longstanding support for religious minorities in Pakistan, particularly the Christian community.”
That was enough for the archbishop to go right ahead and honour the aforementioned Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, the chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, a group of Islamic scholars, without, it would seem, knowing or caring about even the basics of what he has said and what he believes.
It was only when a fuss kicked off after the event that the award was withdrawn, when those words and beliefs were publicised by others, who found it – to put it mildly – concerning that the Church of England was honouring a man who believes that blasphemers in his home country of Pakistan should be executed, who believes that “under the pretext of (war on) Iran, the real target of Jews and Christians is Pakistan’s nuclear power,” and who believes that suicide attacks on Nato troops in Afghanistan are lawful because the troops are invaders. (He later said that this comment was taken out of context.)
Whatever actually happened, the award was only actually withdrawn after a newspaper reported that Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, in response to Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, had praised Osama bin Laden for targeting Brits: “If a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.”
The most depressing aspect of all this is that it is all so predictable. Such people, with such views, are repeatedly fawned over by the C of E. This is merely the latest example.
There is an easy caricature of the average Church of England vicar: wet, woke and witless. Most seem embarrassed by the very idea of God, with a moral framework derived more from embracing the liberal cause de nos jours than anything as un-hip as Christian theology.
That’s one reason why Palestinianism, which is akin to a religion for its adherents, is now so widespread in the C of E. And if that holds for vicars, it holds double for bishops – and archbishops. You’ll struggle to find one who doesn’t worship at the shrine of Palestine.
But as the now withdrawn award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation shows, it’s not just Palestinianism that holds sway. The intellectual vacuity of the contemporary C of E leads to a kind of cultural cringe before other religions – as if Anglicans should feel embarrassed to have their own beliefs and to hold to those beliefs.
That cringe is demonstrated in so much so-called “interfaith” work. But rarely has there been a clearer example than the interfaith award to Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi.
The official picture of the ceremony is striking, with his wife dressed from head to toe in her burqa. This is an especially interesting example of interfaith madness because it is part of a pattern that has become clear since Mullally took over as archbishop in January.
It’s possible to see the church’s behaviour previously less as deliberately provocative than dangerously naïve. Justin Welby, for example, was no less obsequious in his embrace of Muslim clerics who stood for the destruction not just of Christianity but of the West itself. But Welby seemed, like so many of his fellow Anglicans, to be simply clueless and out of his depth rather than ideological.
Mullally is different. She seems to have ingested Palestinianism to such an extent that she is actively using her position to push ideas which are hostile both to Jews and to the West – such as her award to Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi.
She was a vocal supporter, for example, of the Kairos II declaration, which refers to Israel’s Gaza campaign as a “genocidal war” and describes the Jewish state as a “colonial enterprise built on racism”. She spoke in support of the statement at the Synod in July, when the church voted to hear it. Kairos II portrays Israel as inherently racist and rejects its very existence.
There are many moderate Palestinian Christians who could merit support from the archbishop. Instead, she chose to back the most extreme statement that has ever been put before the Synod. Kairos II states that Israel exists only through genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, racism and Jewish supremacy. It denies the idea of two peoples each with legitimate rights and instead argues that Palestinians are blameless victims of Jewish supremacists and rejects any Jewish connection to the land.
In her embrace of Kairos II, which depicts the October 7 massacre in the context of this Jewish illegitimacy, Mullally thus supports a statement which effectively excuses the massacre.
The traditional caricature of the archetypal C of E vicar is almost comforting in its portrayal of a form of bumbling naivety. But while that may still be true for many in the church, it is not at all true for its leader. The Archbishop of Canterbury is no naif and she is no fool, having been the Chief Nursing Officer for England in her former career. And that is deeply concerning.
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