by Andrew Gilligan, Spectator
Many of Britain’s institutions are being destroyed from within by leaders who do not seem to understand what they are for. But even by those standards, the Church of England is a special case, as shown by its decision to spend the 25th anniversary of 9/11 giving a supporter of Osama bin Laden a prize for ‘reconciliation and interfaith cooperation.’
The tragedy of the Church of England – and it is a tragedy – is that we have seldom been in greater need of spiritual and moral leadership. As Matthew Arnold’s famous Dover Beach, lamenting the Sea of Faith’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,’ puts it: ‘We are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.’ If that was so in Arnold’s 1850s, how much more true it is now.
Yet the award of the Hubert Walter prize to the Pakistani cleric Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi is the latest evidence that the Church is not capable of providing that leadership, because it does not know what it is for. Ashrafi, as a three-minute Google search would have found, gave bin Laden the honorific title of Saifullah, or Sword of God, in 2007, in response to the knighting of Salman Rushdie. As the renowned champion of reconciliation and peace explained: ‘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.’
Read also: Is Mullally’s Failure the Last Straw that Breaks the Back of the Church of England? by Gavin Ashenden