The deluded Church of England prefers empty gestures to unpalatable truths.
The absurd Ashrafi case and the misguided Project Spire illustrate fundamental problems with the institution’s mindset
Charles MooreShow biography
Published 18 September 2026 6:53pm.
Hafiz Ashrafi and his wife presented with the Hubert Walter Award by Sarah Mullally, which was later withdrawn Credit: Neil Turner
Paul Stott is the head of security and extremism at the think-tank, Policy Exchange. On Tuesday morning, the online alerts he receives about British relations with Pakistan flashed some photographs put out by the Pakistan government. They showed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, with Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council. Her people posted a picture too.
The scene was the Archbishop’s home, Lambeth Palace. In one picture, she and Maulana (“Master”) Ashrafi were shown holding up the citation with which she had just conferred on him the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith. (Hubert Walter was a mighty Archbishop of Canterbury who agreed with Saladin, Richard I’s great opponent in the Third Crusade, a deal permitting Christians, under Muslim restrictions, to continue to worship in Jerusalem.)
On the Archbishop’s right was a woman so swathed in black that even her eyes could barely be seen. She was Dr Ashrafi’s wife, apparently. In another picture (below) Mrs Ashrafi was standing between her husband and the Archbishop, wearing what looked like the medal of the award. On the Archbishop’s left was another woman, also masked.
The day chosen for the award ceremony had been the previous Friday, Sept 11, the 25th anniversary of the terrorist murder of 3,000 people in the United States.
Dr Stott considered this picture remarkable – it is, if you factor in everything, including its date, tragi-comic – and he tweeted it out. Responders did not take long. By the time I spoke to him on Friday morning, his tweet had been viewed 280,000 times. Almost immediately after it appeared, experts started to produce grim information about Ashrafi. In 2007, he had complained bitterly when Salman Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He declared that, in retaliation, Osama bin Laden, mastermind of that terrible day, “must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah” (which means “Sword of God”).
Other past remarks of Ashrafi include praise of the October 7 massacre of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians in 2023 (“Allah crushed the pride of Israel through the Palestinian freedom fighters”) and for the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former leader of Iran, now “a martyr”. Ashrafi is an enthusiastic supporter of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws which include the death penalty. The evidence produced of his interfaith work was that he had defended a Christian girl in Pakistan who, he believed, had been unjustly accused of blasphemy. Good: but if the accusation had been accurate, would he have let her swing?
On Thursday this week, Lambeth Palace withdrew the Hubert Walter Award because Ashrafi’s previous comments had, said the press release, “come to light”, a phrase implying that you needed to work for MI5 or penetrate the dark web to find out what the Maulana had said. All you needed was 10 minutes on the internet.
Why did the Archbishop’s team not do due diligence? Dame Sarah herself has little background in Muslim matters to bring to bear. Although appointed last October, she has still not sorted out personnel at Lambeth. Her first chief of staff, Becky Clark, replaced the interim people only last week. The press release about Ms Clark’s arrival praised her work “to help church buildings play their part in reaching net zero goals”; she seems to have no interfaith background. Perhaps the interregnum staff were simply ignorant of the often aggressive, anti-British, militant tradition of the Deobandi Sunni version of Islam which is prominent in Pakistan and stirs up trouble among Muslims of Pakistani descent here in Britain.
It seems odd, though. Annual awards do not have a rushed timetable and the Ashrafi one was first recommended in 2024 by the Church’s resident expert on these subjects, Richard Sudworth. He died, sadly young, last year. Ashrafi, allegedly, had been his recommendation. Without Sudworth, perhaps the process just ground on, unthinking. You would have thought, however, given the turmoil in the Islamic world, care would have been taken to pick the right interfaith person to decorate.
Lambeth Palace did not consult the greater expertise across the river in Church House, from which the national Church is administered. If it had asked William Nye, the top Church bureaucrat, who was an expert in counter-extremism when he worked in the Civil Service, it would surely have learnt something to its advantage.
But such points do not fully comprehend the mindset at the top of the Church of England. The problem is not only staff shortages and shallow public affairs teams. There is also a weird reluctance – present, too, within secular British government and most leading British institutions – to scrutinise anything involving Muslims. Asking the necessarily tough questions leaves people open to accusations of “Islamophobia” and racism, which means career death.
In 2009, when I was chairman of Policy Exchange, we published a paper, Choosing Our Friends Wisely, which urged British public authorities to work much harder to understand the strands of Islam in this country and engage only with those who do not invoke Allah to transact extremist politics here and in the Middle East, threaten Jews, and condone terrorist atrocities. More than 15 years later, British institutions still flounder, governed more by fear of Muslim reaction than by the facts on the ground.
The Church of England, of course, should have different priorities from secular institutions. Its eternal concern for peace and unity rightly makes it wish to understand members of other faiths. But wishful thinking does not help understanding. The Ashrafi absurdity illustrates that problem.
There is a wider point too. Archbishop Sarah, critics say, does not set the Thames on fire. True, but that can help. Her conscientious decency is respected. In the end, Justin Welby’s pyrotechnics were rejected by too large a proportion of Anglicans to achieve their intended effects. The new, gentler Archbishop has it in her power to show her care for the parish life which, with its liturgy and Bible, is how the Church serves all of England. She could make that her priority, acknowledging the case made by critics like Save the Parish, recruiting more paid clergy, rather than racial justice advocates and diocesan officials. She could stop jacking up churches’ already massive energy bills by demanding net zero installations. She could celebrate the Church’s many saints rather than disturbing the graves of its sinners (of whom, of course, in our generation, as much as in all past ones, there are many).
The Ashrafi case shows a preference for gesture over facts. The same is true, on a colossal scale, of the Church Commissioners’ Project Spire, their £100m fund to atone for past wrongs related to slavery. Much learned historical work now shows that the Church’s central charge against itself – that, in the 18th century, it funded lots of clergy from the profits of slavery – is untrue. Yet the Church Commissioners refuse to engage with this evidence. As a result, they will soon face a lawsuit claiming they are exceeding their powers by diverting to a specially invented charity sums which have nothing to do with their legal purposes.
The Anglican prayer of “general confession” says: “We have erred, and strayed from your ways like lost sheep.” The additional problem now is a lot of lost shepherds. DT
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