Archbishop of Canterbury withdraws award from Muslim cleric who praised Osama bin Laden

[SigmundinaCafe]

I couldn't see another thread on this topic.

I'm a Christian (born into a Catholic family, yet not aligned to any particular Church) but am AIBU for thinking that that CoE has completely lost the plot? Everything about this stinks to high heaven. Are they not embarrassed or ashamed?

Before you get in to how dodgy this guy is, his wife can't even see properly because of how he makes her dress (see pictures of her niqab, her eyes are barely visible).

This was Nick Timothy on X yesterday:

"The Archbishop of Canterbury has given Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi an award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation. He's the chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council - a group of Islamic scholars. The lady next to him is his wife. But why did the Church grant him this award?

Presumably not for his support for Islamic blasphemy laws in Pakistan and the death penalty that comes with them?

Nor for his reported comments that suicide bombings in Afghanistan were lawful?

(Ashrafi later claimed his comments were taken out of context, but they were deemed sufficiently serious for the NATO Secretary General to respond)

The naivety of our public institutions for engaging with people like this is staggering.

But not surprising.

We are failed time and again by liberals who believe other cultures are basically the same as ours, and the world is or wants to be just like
us."

Now I may be more sensitive than most because I'm a Christian and my husband is Jewish, but is it really too much to ask our institution of English national life not to cosey up to religious extremists who hold women in contempt (and who lets face it would be happy to see most of us dead).

He looks well fed though so clearly being the chairman of the Ulema Council pays very well!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckr50lrz5e6zo

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09/17/archbishop-award-911-anniversary-cleric-bin-laden/

He was given the award but then when it was pointed out that he is a terrorist loving fuckwit they took the award back.

Best summary of a post ever 😂

Did anyone see the Oxford union debate of the motion which was something like ' Is this House right to be suspicious of Islam?' and a Muslim speaker AGAINST the motion actually used Osama Bin Laden as an example of why we should NOT be suspicious of Islam. I am not making that up.

I strongly recommend reading Egyptian historian Bat Ye’or’s The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (1996).

It’s a detailed, heavily documented study of what happened to Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule from the 7th to the 19th centuries. Ye’or draws on Arab, Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Latin and other contemporary sources, including a huge amount of documentary evidence.

What is particularly interesting is her challenge to the idea that Christians and Jews were simply “protected minorities”. She argues that, while there were periods of relative stability and some Christians and Jews were able to prosper through cooperation with Muslim rulers, the wider populations were subjected over centuries to taxation, discrimination, violence, forced displacement and enslavement.

More recently, Black Wave by Kim Ghatias (a Lebanese writer) focuses particularly on the dramatic turning point of 1979 — the Iranian Revolution, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — and how the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran subsequently helped spread religious conservatism, sectarianism and intolerance across the region (is that an acceptable descriptor for you?), at the expense of Jews and Christians - as well as moderate Muslims, of course.

And some are paddling towards losing the plot rather than just sitting there.

Agree.

Which history book did you use to derive the 20% figure from?

Its worth noting that the indigenous people of the land are not just the Jews but also the Samaritans, Kurds, Druze, Yazidis who have tended not to do well under arab muslim expansion and conquering of their lands, or in Yazidi case more recently, under Islamic state.

There are very, very few countries where a dress code is imposed. Regardless, the case in point is the OP stating that the wife of the former award winner is wearing niqab because her husband made me. That is a complete assumption on her part.