Lambeth Withdraws Interfaith Award to Pakistani Cleric Who Once Hailed Bin Laden as “Sword of God”
Grudging retreat exposes a vetting failure at the heart of Sarah Mullally's new archiepiscopate
By David W. Virtue, DD
September 18, 2026
Six days after handing a Pakistani cleric its Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation, Lambeth Palace quietly took it back.
The recipient, Maulana Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, is a formidable operator. He has built a genuine reputation as a broker of religious harmony, a defender of Pakistan's beleaguered Christians, and a fixture of state-sponsored interfaith diplomacy from Islamabad to the Gulf. Lambeth thought it was honoring that man.
It was also honoring another. In 2007, amid protests over Salman Rushdie's British knighthood, Ashrafi pledged to confer on Osama bin Laden the title Saifullah — “Sword of God” — for the service of waging jihad against infidels. That is the man Sarah Mullally, Archbishop of Canterbury, decorated at Lambeth Palace on Friday, September 11 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day bin Laden's disciples murdered nearly three thousand people, sixty-seven of them British.
The National Secular Society called the spectacle obscene and almost beyond parody. For once the secularists had the better of the argument, and the Church of England had no answer.
The retreat, when it came Thursday evening, was a study in institutional embarrassment dressed as principle. Lambeth did not repent; it explained. The award, it insisted, had recognized Ashrafi's support for Pakistan's Christian minority — support, it noted pointedly, valued by that country's own Anglicans. It rehearsed the familiar catechism that dialogue must cross deep differences. Only then, buried beneath the self-justification, came the admission that earlier comments had “come to light” and the honor was withdrawn.
Come to light. A quarter-century of public record, a pledge to canonize the architect of 9/11, and it reached Lambeth's notice only after the medal was pinned and the photographs taken. Ashrafi's office, for its part, complained that his words had been stripped of “proper context” — as though there existed a context in which sanctifying a mass murderer becomes an act of reconciliation.
This is not merely Ashrafi's disgrace. It is Mullally's. An archbishopric barely begun has already demonstrated that Lambeth's interfaith machinery cannot perform the most elementary due diligence before conferring the Church's honors on the anniversary of martyrdom itself. The scandal is not that a bad man was praised. It is that no one thought to ask.
David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.
She was so anxious to honor Ashrafi in the name of DEI, that she neglected to do her homework. Shame on her.
Good for them.
Well, it appears that the folks at Lambeth are not necessarily the brightest lightbulbs on the Christmas tree. In today’s era of high-tech programs, they could’ve easily done a search regarding his background and found out that he is not the kind of person you want to give this award to. But Lambeth is not the first to have failed to do their due diligence, this is becoming more and more normative in our world.