The prize was gone in a week
The award was for interfaith harmony. It came directly from the Archbishop of Canterbury, a prize intended to recognise exceptional contributions to building bridges between the world’s religions. This particular honour was presented by Lambeth Palace at a ceremony on 11 September 2026. The date was significant. It marked twenty five years since the al Qaeda attacks on the United States.
The recipient was a Muslim cleric from Pakistan, selected for what the Church of England believed was a distinguished record of promoting dialogue. He accepted his award on the anniversary of an event that killed almost three thousand people in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. An honour for peace was conferred on a day of profound grief. The incongruity was already sharp. It would become unbearable.
Within days, reports began to circulate online and in the press. They concerned the cleric’s past. Specifically, they highlighted comments he had made which appeared to praise Osama bin Laden, the architect of the 11 September attacks. The news reached Lambeth. The Archbishop’s office acted quickly.
By 17 September, the award was gone.
A statement confirmed the prize had been withdrawn. The announcement came just six days after the ceremony where it had been so publicly bestowed. The honour, given for building bridges, had been handed to a man whose previous statements appeared sympathetic to the individual who had destroyed them so violently. It was an astonishing reversal. The award lasted less than a week. The embarrassment may last much longer.
A controversial figure in dialogue
The man at the centre of the controversy is Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi. He is a prominent cleric in Pakistan. He is a public figure. For years, he has been a significant voice in the country's religious life, serving as chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, a body representing a wide spectrum of Islamic scholars and schools of thought. This position afforded him a platform, one he used to comment on everything from national law to international relations, making him an unavoidable figure for anyone seeking to engage with religious authority in the region. He was not an obscure scholar. He was a known quantity.
To the Church of England, he appeared to be more than just an influential cleric. He seemed to be an ally. His record, viewed from Lambeth, was one of brave moderation in a difficult environment. Mr Ashrafi had publicly condemned sectarian violence. He had spoken in favour of minority rights. He had engaged in dialogue with Christian leaders inside Pakistan, a country where such actions can carry significant personal risk. This was the man the Archbishop’s office saw, a partner in the difficult work of fostering understanding between Islam and Christianity. He was precisely the candidate their award sought to celebrate.
His engagement was not new. Nor was it confined to Pakistan. He was a familiar face in international interfaith circles. He travelled. He attended conferences. There are photographs of him with figures from the Vatican, with American evangelicals, with representatives of the World Council of Churches. He built a reputation over more than a decade as a reliable point of contact, someone who could speak for a significant part of the Pakistani religious establishment while also speaking the language of dialogue that Western institutions value. The award from Lambeth was meant to be the culmination of this work. It was recognition from one of the most senior figures in the Anglican Communion. It suggested his efforts had been successful.
'Without their proper context'
The problem was Osama bin Laden. The award was withdrawn because of past remarks made by Mr Ashrafi. They had emerged after the ceremony. In them, he had praised the founder of al Qaeda. That praise made his position untenable. It made the award impossible.
A spokesperson for Mr Ashrafi issued a statement. It was a short statement. The spokesperson claimed the remarks were being reported ‘without their proper context’. The statement did not, however, offer any detail on what that missing context might be, leaving the original praise to stand in the public record without clarification. For Lambeth Palace, this was not enough. The damage was already done. The simple fact of lauding the man behind the September 11 attacks, an act of mass murder that defined a generation of interfaith relations, could not be easily contextualised away. It could not be explained.
The timing made the situation acute. The Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation was presented to Mr Ashrafi on 11 September, the twenty fifth anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington DC. The irony was severe. An award for harmony, given on a day of such profound division, was now linked to a cleric who had expressed admiration for the man responsible for that day’s atrocities. Whatever the original context of his words, their rediscovery in the days following the award ceremony created an immediate and severe crisis for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office. The context offered by the spokesperson was simply the word 'context'. No further information was supplied. The praise itself, whatever its original setting or intent, remained the central, immovable fact with which officials had to grapple. For an institution trying to build bridges, it was a bridge collapsing in real time. The award had to be rescinded. There was no other option.
How was the check not made?
The core question is simple. How was the check not made? The vetting process at Lambeth Palace for its highest honours is supposed to be rigorous. It is designed to protect the institution, the award itself, and the Archbishop of Canterbury from exactly this kind of embarrassment. It failed completely. Officials at the Church of England’s headquarters have so far declined to detail the specific procedure for selecting recipients of the Hubert Walter Award. This silence leaves the failure open to scrutiny. The public has not been told who nominates candidates. It does not know who approves them.
Such a breakdown suggests a catastrophic oversight in basic due diligence. Mr Ashrafi is a public figure in Pakistan. His views are not hidden. They are not obscure. His past statements, including those which expressed sympathy for Osama bin Laden, were a matter of public record and accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a search engine. The information did not require deep investigation by specialist researchers or intelligence operatives fluent in multiple languages. It was online. It was discoverable. The failure was not in finding a needle in a haystack, but in seeing the haystack itself. For an organisation with the global reach and resources of the Church of England, this represents a fundamental collapse of internal controls.
The Archbishop’s awards are not informal affairs. They are a significant part of the Church’s public ministry and its engagement with other faiths and communities around the world. A formal process of nomination, research and final approval would be expected for any candidate, let alone one from a region with complex political and religious dynamics. Lambeth Palace has not confirmed whether this process was followed. It has not said if a committee was responsible for Mr Ashrafi’s selection. It has not explained what materials were reviewed, what advice was taken, or who ultimately gave the final authorisation for the award to be conferred on a man who had praised the architect of the 11 September attacks.
This chain of events raises serious questions for the Archbishop’s office. The entire purpose of a vetting procedure is to prevent the principal, in this case Justin Welby, from being placed in an indefensible position. That is precisely what happened. The system did not just malfunction. It produced an outcome that was the exact opposite of its intention, bestowing an honour for harmony upon a figure whose public statements contradicted that very ideal. It created a crisis where there should have been a celebration of interfaith work. The result was an unforced error. The institution now faces calls for a full internal review to understand why its own safety mechanisms broke down so spectacularly. Nobody has yet taken responsibility.
An effort to build bridges backfires
The award was intended to build bridges. It was for interfaith harmony. The gesture was meant to be a symbol of reconciliation, a high profile commendation of Christian Muslim dialogue from one of the world’s most senior Anglican leaders. That was the goal. The result was a public relations disaster that has damaged the very cause it was designed to serve. Instead of fostering trust, the episode has sown confusion and embarrassment. An honour intended to heal the wounds of 11 September became a fresh source of controversy, directly connected to the original attacks by its timing and the recipient’s history. The project failed. It backfired completely.
This affair damages the credibility of the Church of England’s wider interfaith work. An award from the Archbishop of Canterbury is supposed to be a significant honour, its value derived from the careful judgement and moral authority of the office that bestows it. The withdrawal suggests a lack of rigour. It suggests a process that is flawed. Potential partners in dialogue, both in Britain and abroad, may now question the competence of the Archbishop’s office. The value of the award itself is diminished, not just for Mr Ashrafi but for all past and future recipients who may now find their own honour tainted by association with this failure. The Church’s ability to confer legitimacy through such prizes has been seriously compromised by an error that was both elementary and profound.
The damage extends to the communities the Church sought to engage. The original decision to honour a prominent Pakistani cleric was a strategic choice, designed to signal the Church’s commitment to building relationships with the global Muslim community. The reversal, while unavoidable once Mr Ashrafi’s remarks became public, creates its own set of problems. It risks causing offence. It leaves the institution looking inept. The Church of England now finds itself in the deeply uncomfortable position of having to explain a catastrophic failure of due diligence that has simultaneously offended partners it wished to embrace and vindicated critics who view its interfaith efforts with suspicion. It has managed to disappoint everyone. It is a political own goal.
Ultimately, an initiative meant to showcase the positive potential of interfaith relations has done the opposite. It has provided a textbook example of the pitfalls. The affair gives ammunition to those who argue that such engagement is naive, poorly executed and freighted with unacceptable risk. Rather than celebrating a success story, Lambeth Palace is now consumed by damage control, forced to explain how its own systems for vetting and approval broke down so completely. The bridge it sought to construct between Canterbury and communities in Pakistan was not built. In fact, the project collapsed before the first stone was properly laid, leaving behind only the wreckage of good intentions.
Scrutiny for the Archbishop's office
The questions now turn to Lambeth Palace. The decision to present the award, and the humiliating duty to withdraw it, both originated from the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Justin Welby’s name was on the prize. The failure is therefore attached to his leadership. His office failed. His judgement is now in question. This was not a subtle error of theological interpretation or a nuanced disagreement over doctrine, but a straightforward, discoverable, factual oversight concerning a recipient's public record. Information that was readily available in the public domain, including past statements by Mr Ashrafi that had caused controversy in Pakistan and beyond, was seemingly not discovered or not considered significant by the team responsible for due diligence. That is the central problem.
Calls for an internal review are now inevitable. Such a review would have to examine the entire selection and vetting process for the Archbishop's personal awards to restore any measure of confidence. It would need to establish a clear chain of events. Who first proposed Mr Ashrafi's name? What research was commissioned? Who signed off on the final recommendation presented to the Archbishop? Without answers to these questions, the suspicion of institutional incompetence will linger, poisoning future announcements and undermining the authority of the office. The palace has not yet commented on a formal inquiry. It is expected to do so.
The most probable outcome is a complete overhaul of vetting. Procedures will be tightened. The remit for background checks will almost certainly be expanded, with a greater emphasis on scrutinising a candidate's entire public history, not just their more recent interfaith work. New layers of approval may be added. A dedicated committee could be formed to take on the task, insulating the Archbishop from direct responsibility for the initial checks and creating a clearer line of accountability when mistakes are made. These are administrative changes. They are born of embarrassment. They are designed to ensure one thing: that this never happens again. The archbishop's office cannot afford another such public failure. It has made the institution look foolish.
Sources. BBC News UK: Archbishop of Canterbury withdraws award from Muslim cleric who praised Osama bin Laden. Evening Standard: Lambeth Palace withdraws award to Muslim cleric over Osama bin Laden remarks.
Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.
