There are mistakes that can reasonably be put down to oversight. But a string of recent missteps by the Church of England suggests a failure of judgment. These decisions were all made in pursuit of laudable goals: interfaith engagement, solidarity with those who suffer, and a desire to listen to Palestinian Christian voices. The problem is that, in pursuing them, the Church has too often failed to apply the scrutiny, balance and moral clarity they require.
On September 11, the 25th anniversary of the Islamist attacks on New York and Washington, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, presented an interfaith award to Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council. Within a week, it had to be withdrawn.
The reason was not some obscure indiscretion, but Ashrafi’s well-publicised response to Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, when he proposed that Osama bin Laden should be honoured with the title Saifullah, or “Sword of God”. His representatives now say the remarks were intended as an analogy about the offence caused by Rushdie’s honour, not an endorsement of Bin Laden.
Ashrafi is also known for supporting Pakistan’s severe blasphemy laws that include the death penalty, under which religious minorities, including Christians, have suffered grievously, and for stating that “under the pretext of (war on) Iran, the real target of Jews and Christians is Pakistan’s nuclear power”.
More disturbing still, this was not an isolated lapse for the Church.
At Leeds Minster, an exhibition displayed a memorial to Palestinians reported killed in Gaza. Before it opened, the Leeds Jewish Representative Council raised concerns that terrorist names appeared in the wider project. Yet it went ahead, and was closed only after Jewish representatives supplied further evidence.
The conduct surrounding this controversy made matters worse. Canon Paul Maybury, the rector, was filmed being challenged about Shiri Bibas and her sons Ariel, aged four, and Kfir, just ten months old, who were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 and later murdered in Gaza. Asked about their fate, he replied that “the history is complex”; pressed further, he declined to comment. Whatever one’s view of Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, there is nothing morally complex about the abduction and murder of a mother and two small children.
These episodes follow the General Synod’s decision in July to encourage Anglicans to engage with Kairos II, a text that describes Israel as a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity”, presents the Gaza war as a continuation of a Zionist project to empty Palestine of Palestinians, considers the Jewish state illegitimate and calls on churches to distinguish between dialogue with Jews and dialogue with Zionists. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, warned that the text contained grave falsehoods and could damage the cause of peace and yet the Synod voted overwhelmingly to hear it.
Taken together, these episodes suggest an institution insufficiently alert to how the pursuit of what seem laudable causes can itself produce moral blind spots.That matters because the Church of England is not merely another voluntary association. It is the Established Church of the country, which Queen Elizabeth II described as having a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths.
For Jews, there is a further reason for concern as the Church does not approach these questions on historically neutral ground. In 2019 it recognised that Christian theology had helped compound and spread anti-Jewish hatred. That history does not require the Church automatically to agree with the Israeli government or ignore Palestinian Christians. But it ought to teach discrimination – in the older and better sense: the capacity to distinguish compassion from credulity, criticism of a government from narratives that deny a people’s history, and the mourning of innocent victims from the commemoration of terrorists.
Withdrawing an award and closing an exhibition were necessary corrections, but they do not answer why decisions of such obvious sensitivity were made in the first place, or why the objections that exposed their defects came from outside before sufficient doubts arose within. The problem is not the Church’s desire for interfaith engagement or its concern for those who suffer. It is the failure to apply sufficient scrutiny in pursuing those aims and to extend to Jews the care and moral clarity that its history and office should demand.
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