The most striking elements of the photograph, however, are the women, one of them Ashrafi’s wife, dressed entirely in black, their faces covered by niqabs that leave only their eyes visible. The contrast is difficult to miss. Beside them stands Britain’s first female Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, a former nurse and one of the Church of England’s most prominent liberal figures.
The image encapsulates a wider contradiction in the modern West: a Christian institution that celebrates the breaking of barriers for women at home also embraces representatives of religious cultures in which women may appear in public almost entirely concealed. The juxtaposition is so striking that the photograph could almost have been lifted from a Monty Python sketch.
Dialogue in a Changed Britain
There is, however, a deeper question behind all this talk of “interfaith dialogue”. Dialogue presupposes communities sufficiently different that they require mediation. For much of Britain’s modern history, religious tensions certainly existed, not least the long history of discrimination against Catholics and Jews. But these were predominantly tensions within Christianity or between Christianity and Judaism, the religion from which Christianity emerged.
The issues Britain confronts today reach far beyond theology. The country has had to contend with Islamist terrorism and the oppression of women, as well as grooming-gang scandals in which questions of ethnicity, religion and culture have become sufficiently contentious that the government’s statutory inquiry is explicitly examining all three. There have also been multiple cases of violence or threats against people accused of blaspheming Islam or leaving the religion.
Other debates concern cousin marriage and how far public institutions should accommodate religious practices, from encouraging non-Muslims to observe Ramadan to accommodating dietary requirements in schools. These issues are not morally or legally equivalent, but they have one thing in common: they require British institutions to negotiate cultural practices and conflicts that were largely absent from modern British life.
Perhaps, then, the fashionable language of “interfaith dialogue” deserves to be turned on its head. Britain is repeatedly told that greater religious diversity makes more dialogue necessary. But that raises an uncomfortable question: how much of the need for such dialogue has been created by the very transformation it is now supposed to manage?
When “Interfaith” Becomes a Farce
A closer look at Ashrafi’s record might have spared Mullally and the Church of England considerable embarrassment. In 2007, after the British government awarded Salman Rushdie a knighthood, Ashrafi announced that the Pakistan Ulema Council would honor Osama bin Laden in response, bestowing on the al-Qaeda leader the title “Saifullah”, or “Sword of God”.
That record makes an award for “Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation” particularly striking. In 2018, Ashrafi publicly demanded a ban on all Ahmadi literature and called for copies of the Quran translated by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community to be confiscated. Ahmadis follow a 19th-century Islamic movement whose founder claimed to be the Messiah. A UK government country-policy report on the persecution of Ahmadis records his remarks, noting that he used the derogatory term “Qadiani” – derived from the founder’s birthplace – to brand the religious minority heretics.
There is a further contradiction. Ashrafi has since presented himself as an advocate of religious coexistence, declaring that no minority should be harmed in the name of religion and calling interfaith dialogue “essential”. Yet his documented statements about Ahmadis sit uneasily with the very principles of religious tolerance and interfaith cooperation for which Lambeth Palace has now honored him.
In other words, the whole thing looks like a sham. Perhaps that is what makes Ashrafi’s broad smile in the photograph so unintentionally fitting, and so irritating: beside him stands his wife, dressed entirely in black with her face covered, while Britain’s first female Archbishop of Canterbury honors him for religious tolerance. You could hardly devise a more perfect satire.
