My boss Lord Singh of Wimbledon was one of the founders of the Inter Faith Network for the UK (IFN) in 1987. In February 2024, the IFN had its funding withdrawn by Michael Gove, who was then the government’s communities secretary. The organisation had done some good work during its 37 years, but Gove objected to the appointment of a member of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) as a trustee. A previous Labour government had suspended engagement with the MCB in 2009 after one of its senior officials signed a declaration that seemed to condone violence against Israel. As a result of the IFN’s MCB appointment, around £150,000 worth of government funding was withheld by Gove, and the organisation folded.

There was a lesson in that episode, but it is not one that the Church of England has been in a hurry to learn. Earlier this month, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, blundered into a mortifying interfaith debacle of her own. Lambeth Palace was forced to withdraw a prestigious award—the Hubert Walter Award for “Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation”—from a Pakistani Muslim cleric named Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, after it emerged that Ashrafi had previously praised Osama bin Laden. To make matters worse, the award was presented on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people, including 67 British citizens.

A few days after the award was presented, Dr Paul Stott, head of security and extremism at the Policy Exchange think-tank, posted the now-infamous image of Mullally, Ashrafi, and Ashrafi’s heavily veiled wife. Stott had obtained the image from a Pakistani government website, but he observed that it was “curiously missing” from the Archbishop’s website. He did find some pictures on Lambeth Palace’s Flickr account, but they have since been removed. Stott’s post attracted nearly 300,000 impressions, triggering scrutiny of Ashrafi by those keen to discover the views of the man honoured for his contributions to “reconciliation” and “interfaith cooperation.”