A Church of Pakistan perspective on interfaith responsibility in public life
By Michelle Samuel
18 September 2026
The withdrawal of Tahir Ashrafi’s Lambeth Award exposes a serious failure of due diligence, but it also reveals a deeper Western misunderstanding. The suffering of religious communities, religious freedom and interfaith harmony overlap, but they are not interchangeable. In Pakistan, interfaith harmony is the difficult daily work of remaining in relationship while religious communities endure violence, discrimination and fear, and religious freedom remains incomplete.
25 years after 9/11, Canterbury did something bold. Some people watched in awe, others in confusion. Lambeth invited a man who, almost 19 years ago, made shocking remarks celebrating Osama Bin Laden. This was not an invitation to have tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Lambeth conferred an award on him for interfaith harmony. To the Christian eye, this seemed perfectly natural, a generous recognition, a sister saying ‘Thank you’ for taking care of her family under threat. Of course I mean the Most Revd Sarah Mulhally, recognising the courage of Maulana Ashrafi in standing up for her Christian family in the aftermath of terrorism and in the middle of a season of hostility against Christians in Pakistan.
To the tired Briton who has seen their country morph into ‘Londistan’ it was yet another capitulation. To the incessant netizen, it looked like ‘the world gone mad’; to the politically correct, it was just simply bad optics. So they correct bad optics by creating worse ones. If it was bad optics to have a less than healthy, less than sculpted mascot for religious freedom, standing with two women veiled in niqab, with the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, however, it was far worse as a consequence to rescind the award. Some people removed their pictures from the event, and others removed the award from the recipient. In a bid for curated bespoke optics that tell a sanitised story, the Church in Pakistan’s telling of gritty reality was discarded.
To be clear, after the attacks on Jaranwala in 2023, and in recognition of the decade-long support for the church, the Church of Pakistan recommended Maulana Ashrafi to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, The Most Rev Justin Welby, for his work on Interfaith harmony. This recommendation followed his successful visit to Pakistan, facilitated by Maulana Ashrafi in February 2022, which enabled them to address issues concerning Christian in the country.
This award was presented on 11 September 2026. Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi received the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Co-operation at Lambeth Palace for going above and beyond to ensure the voice of violently oppressed Christians is heard. The citation recognised his work as an ambassador of interfaith harmony in Pakistan. Within days, pressure grew, and Lambeth Palace withdrew the award.
The controversy has rightly raised questions about judgment and due diligence. Those questions must be answered. The manner of the withdrawal has created what is clearly an administrative, political and, critically, a moral failure: Canterbury treated a relationship formed in the dangerous realities of Pakistan as though it were a public-relations object that could be displayed and then removed when the British political weather changed. It also confronts Canterbury with a question larger than this award: is it acting as a Church within the Communion and the body of Christ, or as an arm of politics responsive first to British public pressure?
The Church in Pakistan’s relationship with Maulana Ashrafi could never have flourished if he were an extremist. The Church of Pakistan nominated Ashrafi from within its own lived experience. Every few years, the Church of England offers a chance to nominate a person of significance in various fields. This year was no different. The Church of Pakistan did not develop the idea in a vacuum. Lambeth and the Church of Pakistan had been discussing this nomination for some time. To be specific, since 2023. When Christian homes and churches were attacked, Maulana Ashrafi stood with us. Many people did. That solidarity did not erase every troubling word in his record. There will always be differences in our opinions and perspectives. Faith differences are significant differences. That is why Interfaith Harmony and Engagements take hard work and deep commitment to respect and honour. They are not, and cannot be, simple, easy formulas. Nonetheless, in the hour of our grief, Maulana Ashrafi was willing to stand up to hostile stakeholders and say ‘This was wrong’. Even if it was for the cameras, which it was not, it demonstrates that Maulana Ashrafi is willing to do what it takes to actively craft a narrative of hope. It mattered to a Church carrying grief and continuing vulnerability, so they nominated him.
Canterbury ought to have examined the nomination rigorously. But on what criteria? The criteria of a Church seeking to build bridges. Or the criteria of a political institution seeking to preserve its national interests? Once we establish the criteria on which Canterbury should act, then we can decide whether they should have approved the nomination in the first place. Then Maulana Ashrafi would never have known that anyone nominated him, or that Canterbury was considering him and rejecting him. Nonetheless, Canterbury called him, congratulated him, invited him, and then conferred the award on him, his wife, and his daughter. By including his wife and his daughter during the award ceremony, Maulana Ashrafi demonstrated deep trust and respect for the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Maulana Ashrafi is in his own right a powerful, influential leader of millions of Pakistani Muslims. This rescinding of the award is not just an injury to the man and the institutions that support his work, but also a betrayal of his trust and honour.
Canterbury should never have invited him, accepted the nomination, or broken bread with the recipient without basic vetting. The manner of the withdrawal has communicated, whether intended or not, that the lived reality of Christians in Pakistan carries less weight than political pressure in Britain. Again, the communion is undermined!
Three realities that must not be confused
A lot of language and discourse is being flung about social media right now. The first intellectual mistake in this debate is collapsing three related realities into one: persecution, religious freedom, and interfaith harmony. In essence, we may all think we know this, but as comments and discourse progress, the lines and distinctions blur. It is worth our while to stop and consider these distinct areas of discourse that are pertinent to a melting pot world where migration, immigration, asylum seeking, and smuggling are changing the nature of our streets, neighbourhoods, churches, academics, and politics.
We must recognise that each asks a different question. What wrong is being suffered? What freedom is owed to every person? How do people of different faiths live and act together? Clear answers are essential, because progress in one area does not prove that the other two have been secured.
Persecution
Persecution is the wrong suffered by a person or community because of faith or religious identity. It includes discrimination, coercion, false accusation, mob violence, forced conversion, destruction of homes or places of worship, forced displacement and denial of equal citizenship. It is the use of power to punish, silence, intimidate or remove a religious community.
Religious freedom
Religious freedom is the moral, legal and social freedom owed to every person: to hold a faith, change faith, reject faith, worship, teach, gather, organise and live according to conscience. That freedom is exercised within the equal dignity and rights of others; it does not protect violence, coercion or practices that destroy another person’s life or liberty. Religious freedom therefore requires more than tolerance. It requires law, public institutions and social habits that protect conscience and equal citizenship.
Interfaith harmony
Interfaith harmony is the relational work of living together across religious difference. It appears when neighbours, religious leaders and institutions build trust, restrain hostility, protect one another and cooperate for justice. A priest attending an iftar during Ramadan or a cleric joining a Christmas celebration can be a good sign of an enduring friendship, but the real test comes after an atrocity. When a church is blackened by fire and families are afraid to return home, who comes? Who condemns the violence without qualification? Who remains after the cameras leave? In Pakistan, the answer has often been the Church and those Muslim friends willing to stand beside her. Maulana Ashrafi is one such friend. The complexity of that friendship demands humility from distant observers, not simplistic judgment.
Where the three realities overlap
The three realities overlap without becoming the same. Persecution violates religious freedom and damages relations between communities. Religious freedom creates the legal and social space in which interfaith relationships can grow. Interfaith harmony can help defend religious freedom and resist persecution by creating trusted relationships through which leaders intervene in a crisis. Yet a cordial relationship cannot substitute for equal rights, and an interfaith event cannot be offered as proof that persecution has ended. Pakistan has not found a complete way out of persecution. It has, however, developed forms of deliberation born from necessity. Religious leaders sit together, argue, intervene, negotiate protection and seek practical routes through crisis. The work is unfinished and sometimes unsuccessful, but it is real.
Religious freedom in daily life
Religious freedom in the twenty-first century cannot be measured only by constitutional language, conferences or awards. It must be secured in streets, workplaces, schools, markets, courts and neighbourhoods. The law must protect Christians, Muslims, Parsi, Hindus, Sikhs, Ahmadis as equal citizens. Public institutions must act before a crowd decides whose conscience, home or place of worship may be violated. Interfaith relationships can support that freedom, but they cannot replace the state’s duty to uphold it.
This distinction is especially important across Asia, where religious plurality is not a newly discovered policy field but an ancient social reality. Communities have lived beside one another for millennia through peace, rivalry, patronage, discrimination and violence. Interfaith harmony in such settings is not an institutional experiment. It is a discipline learned through proximity, tested by crisis and sustained by memory.
Christian memory in the subcontinent reaches far beyond the British Empire. History places Thomas the apostle at the court of the Indo-Parthian king Gundaphar, a ruler known independently through coins and inscriptions. The apostolic encounter carries a profound image: a foreign early Christian of Jewish descent-a craftsman received at an Asian court, serving a king while establishing a Christian witness. Christianity in South Asia cannot be reduced to an imperial import. We have been navigating the realities of the Subcontinent for 2000 years. We know how to pick a nominee for shining in the area of interfaith harmony.
Why the Church of Pakistan nominated Tahir Ashrafi
The nomination did not declare Tahir Ashrafi infallible. An interfaith award is not canonisation, and partnership is not agreement with every statement a person has ever made. The nomination recognised conduct within a particular relationship and a particular field of success and operation, ie Interfaith Harmony.
Jaranwala is central to that judgment. In August 2023, after allegations of Qur’an desecration, mobs attacked Christian neighbourhoods, burning and vandalising churches and homes. Archbishop Azad Marshall publicly cried out for justice, protection and recognition that Christians’ lives were valuable in their own homeland; he described their condition as a form of legal apartheid. In the Church of Pakistan’s account, Ashrafi did not remain at a safe distance. He stood with the Christian community and its Archbishop during a moment of fear and humiliation.
That presence cannot erase his record. The 2007 remarks that triggered the present controversy were grave and deeply offensive, especially when an award was presented on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 11 September attacks. Canterbury should have discovered, assessed and discussed them before the ceremony. Ashrafi should have been asked to defend himself and address them directly, state whether he repudiates them, and explain the change his later work represents.
Moral seriousness also asks whether people can change. If interfaith work has any purpose, it must include the possibility that a political and religious leader can move away from dangerous rhetoric, form relationships with those once regarded with suspicion and use his influence to protect a vulnerable community. A record of change does not make the past disappear. It may, however, be exactly what reconciliation is meant to recognise.
The Church goes where love is costly
The Church’s vocation is not to meet only the approved, the safe or the already converted to its vocabulary. Christ goes into the difficult place with truth and love. The Church therefore sits with those whom the world may call enemies, not because evil is unreal, but because no human being is beyond recognition, transformation or responsibility.
For Christians in Pakistan, such engagement is not a fashionable commission or a carefully staged dinner. It is part of survival and witness. We sit with Muslim leaders while speaking truthfully about the suffering of religious communities. We ask them to oppose extremist violence. We risk disappointment and sometimes betrayal. They, too, may risk condemnation by standing with us. This is gritty work. It leaves mud under the fingernails. It cannot be managed as a clean ceremonial box that is opened for a photograph and closed when controversy arrives.
In the case of Tahir Ashrafi, the Church did not merely sit with him. He also chose to sit with the Church and actively pursue a more harmonious relationship. That reciprocity is what Canterbury failed to understand when it treated the award solely as a British reputational problem and forgot that it is about a communion! What communion? I am beginning to ask! Our Communion was with the Church of England and our interfaith engagement and harmony were with Maulana Tahir. Both have been damaged and First Aid and Triage must come from Canterbury.
Canterbury must choose communion over political expediency
The Church of Pakistan is an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. It is not administratively under the Archbishop of Canterbury. Communion is not a system of control from a Western centre; it is a fellowship within the body of Christ, expressed through shared faith, mutual counsel and the bearing of one another’s burdens. Those bonds may be strained by serious theological disagreements, but they cannot mean that the experience of a Western church automatically overrides the discernment of a church living as a vulnerable minority in an Islamic republic.
Canterbury’s decision has consequences beyond London. The Church of Pakistan made a nomination based on relationships built over years and tested during actual suffering. To withdraw the honour abruptly, without an evident process of consultation with the nominating church and without a visible assessment of local consequences, risks humiliating the recipient, discrediting the nominators and exposing Christian partners in Pakistan to renewed anger. A Church acting within communion must take those consequences seriously because, in the body of Christ, the suffering of one member cannot be treated as a distant inconvenience.
This crisis therefore poses more searching questions for Canterbury than it does for us. The Church of Pakistan knows why it nominated Tahir Ashrafi: in our time of suffering, he stood with us. Canterbury must explain why the judgment of that Church surviving in challenges, was accepted in ceremony and treated as expendable when political pressure arrived. It must decide whether its first instinct is to remain in faithful relationship with the Communion or to function as an ecclesiastical arm of British politics. If Canterbury made the original mistake through inadequate vetting, it should not shift the full cost of correcting it to partners who live with the consequences far from Britain.
What Canterbury should do now
First, Lambeth Palace should disclose how it received, assessed, approved and later reconsidered the nomination. The central question is not only who nominated Ashrafi or who presented the award. It is who recommended withdrawal, what information was considered, whether Ashrafi was invited to respond, whether the Church of Pakistan was consulted, and whether risks to Christians in Pakistan were assessed? What happened to the ‘Do no harm’ policies?
Second, Canterbury should apologise to Tahir Ashrafi and to the Church of Pakistan for the failure of process and for the public humiliation created by conferring an honour before completing adequate due diligence. Such an apology need not endorse his 2007 remarks. Instead, it can show its own disagreement with those remarks while accepting institutional responsibility for how the matter was handled.
Third, the Archbishop of Canterbury should meet Archbishop Azad Marshall and representatives of the Church of Pakistan to hear why the nomination was made and what Ashrafi’s presence has meant in moments such as Jaranwala. Criticism is relevant and necessary, but it is not the only testimony that matters. This listening should have preceded any decision to rescind the award; it remains essential now.
Fourth, future Lambeth Awards involving conflict-affected settings should include structured consultation with the nominating province, independent historical review, a right of response for the proposed recipient and a security-impact assessment before any public announcement. Canterbury should also state whether appropriate government or security advice was sought in this case. An institution that frequently intervenes in political questions cannot treat basic due diligence as an afterthought when an overseas church’s safety and credibility are at stake.
The meaning of the award
The deepest irony is that the controversy could have become a mature testimony to reconciliation. Canterbury could have said that Ashrafi’s past words were indefensible, that his later solidarity with Christians mattered, and that the award recognised movement toward a better public witness rather than perfection. It could have invited him to recommit himself to protecting every vulnerable religious community. It could also have asked the Church of Pakistan how the matter should be addressed publicly, honouring the mutuality that a troubled Communion still claims to seek. The calls on social media to ask him to repudiate his claims would mean that every officer who has sworn in a British Asian and granted them British Nationality should be responsible for the British Grooming Gangs and their salaries or pensions should be revoked?
In fact, Canterbury first honoured him without adequate preparation and then withdrew the honour under pressure. That sequence satisfied neither truth nor reconciliation. It embarrassed the Archbishop of Canterbury, humiliated a Pakistani Muslim leader, disregarded the judgment of the Church of Pakistan and left those closest to the risk to manage the fallout. It also revealed how quickly political pressure could outweigh the obligations of communion.
Real religious freedom is a conviction about the dignity of conscience, not permission to associate only with people whose biographies have been sanitised for Western approval. This is where Christianity sets us apart. This is where compliance and political correctness is becoming the new engine of persecution to restrict and suffocate Christ’s Church.
Britain, and in this case its religious arm, the Church of England, which bows to its every whim, must apply lawful and proportionate security scrutiny within its own borders while refusing masses of radicals onto its own soil before trying to make such a sweeping judgment call about those who operate in real and authentic grit in countries like Pakistan. It must also examine interfaith partners carefully before damaging the work in another country and context and the overall testimony of the Communion. The inconsistency lies in neglecting serious scrutiny at one moment and then performing moral certainty after the consequences have been transferred to others. For Christians in Pakistan, religious freedom is also a spiritual practice, lived under the protection expressed in Saint Patrick’s prayer, The Deer’s Cry. It is the freedom to worship, speak truth, remain a neighbour under pressure and protect the vulnerable without pretending that the suffering of religious communities has ended. Interfaith harmony is the costly decision to keep walking together while seeking a way out of violence, legal inequality and terror.
The Church of Pakistan nominated Tahir Ashrafi because, when Christian churches were burning, it knew whom it could call a friend. Canterbury may reconsider an award, but it should not dismiss the experience that made the nomination possible. An inquiry, a direct conversation and an apology are now required—not to avoid hard truths, but to face all of them. At the end of every paragraph I resist the urge to say ‘Thank you Sarah Mulhally’
A missional call after the crisis
This crisis is not only an administrative failure to be investigated. It is a missional test. The Church’s feet are being held to the fire. We bring the most searching questions before Canterbury and the wider communion. Will the Church use this moment merely to defend institutions and manage political reputations, or will it receive it as a summons to repentance, repair and a more faithful life within the body of Christ?
To the Church in the United Kingdom
What will the Church in the UK do to demonstrate grace and moral seriousness after the crisis Canterbury has opened? It must resist both a complacent multiculturalism that refuses to name extremism and a collective suspicion that treats Muslim neighbours as a problem to be managed. It must distinguish the suffering of religious communities from religious freedom, and both from the patient work of interfaith harmony. It must listen to churches that live as vulnerable minorities, examine Britain’s imperial inheritance honestly and build local relationships strong enough to survive controversy. Mission in Britain requires the humility to receive wisdom from beyond the West. It is not enough to eat a delicious Iftar meal in a mosque during Ramadhan. We need to be willing to pursue a more robust form of action, engagement and demand change.
To the Church of Pakistan
What does faithfulness require of us in Pakistan? We must continue to name the suffering of religious communities, identify its causes and insist on equal citizenship and the protection of law. We must continue to remain present as full and responsible citizens. At the same time, we must not abandon the relationships through which Muslim and Christian leaders can intervene when fear becomes violence. We must neither romanticise interfaith friendship nor retreat from it when it becomes costly. Our calling is to keep the table open, hold our friends to account, protect the vulnerable and show that the Gospel’s ministry of reconciliation does not deny injustice; it enters the place of danger in order to confront it.
To the Anglican Communion
How will the Communion draw alongside the Church of Pakistan and make repairs that honour God? Repairs that the wider communion is not responsible for in the last 72 hours. But repairs that only a stronger Christ-centred communion can make through love and goodwill. It must listen before it judges, consult before decisions are announced and share the risks created by those decisions. It needs transparent processes for due diligence, a right of response, meaningful consultation with the nominating province and a serious assessment of consequences for vulnerable communities. Communion cannot mean a decision made in London whose human and developmental cost is borne elsewhere. Canterbury’s role is not to reproduce the habits of political power, but to strengthen the bonds of Christ’s body through truth, mutual responsibility, apology and repair.
These questions cannot be postponed to the next article or the next commission. They are the Church’s mission now. Will we become a Communion that tells the truth about the suffering endured by religious communities, defends religious freedom for every person and sustains interfaith relationships when they are tested? Will we carry the Christ light? Will we make room for repentance and change without surrendering moral clarity? The credibility of the Church will not be restored by better messaging. It will be restored through just and prayerful action: an honest inquiry, a direct apology, patient repair and a common witness shaped by justice, mercy and humility.
That is the road of interfaith harmony: not the denial of suffering, not retreat from religious freedom, but faithful presence in the midst of both.
Note: Bishop Azad Marshall, the moderator Bishop of the Church of Pakistan has given an interview on the withdrawal of the award to Tahir Ashrafi which will be published in the next couple of days.
For more information please contact Canon Dr Chris Sugden on 07808297043 (csugden@ocrpl.org) who will have contact details for Bishop Azad Marshall.