Islam needs self-critique and progressive reform, not mollycoddling from the Archbishop of Canterbury

Our human rights lead @logomachist is quoted in @JewishNewsUK, describing an award given to an Osama Bin Laden apologist on the anniversary of 9/11 by the archbishop of Canterbury as "obscene" 👇https://t.co/4bd348pOxc

— National Secular Society (@NatSecSoc) September 17, 2026

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s decision to give Pakistani cleric Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi the prestigious Hubert Walter Award on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks did not sit well with many people—naturally, because Ashrafi had once eulogised Osama bin Laden as the ‘Sword of Allah’. Lambeth Palace quickly rescinded the award amid the backlash, but this incident is just the latest example of the mollycoddling of Muslim representatives and Islamic clerics in the West, whereby even those perceived as taking mere baby steps away from the predominant, hostile Islamist line are deemed award-worthy.

Ashrafi was initially given the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation for safeguarding minority rights in Pakistan. Notwithstanding Ashrafi’s support for armed jihad, including his approval of suicide bombings, the entirety of his ostensible work to protect Pakistan’s vulnerable minorities boils down to giving the odd statement in support of a victim and cutting the occasional Christmas cake. Nobody—neither rights groups in the West nor the loud Muslim activists who see bigotry everywhere except within—seems to be interested in asking Muslim representatives the fundamental questions they would normally pose to members of other communities.

Clearly, the Hubert Walter Award committee did not want to ask Ashrafi, a cleric who has held government posts in Pakistan for years, why individuals can convert from other religions to Islam, but face death for leaving Islam in Pakistan; or why not a single Hindu temple has been constructed in the entirety of Pakistan’s existence as a modern state, while Ashrafi endorses mosques being built the world over; or what happened to the Jews of Pakistan, given that he endorses Palestinian jihad aimed at the erasure of Israeli Jews. Ashrafi remains a strong advocate of Pakistan’s bloodthirsty blasphemy laws, which codify death for words and expressions against Islam.

None of this is new, of course. Saudi cleric Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, the recipient of, among others, Italy’s Galileo Galilei International Award and Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Global Interfaith Leadership Award, wasn’t required to condemn Saudi judicial abuses, which he oversaw as the justice minister, before being celebrated by the United Nations. Tunisian politician Rached Ghannouchi, the recipient of the Chatham House Prize in 2012, was long affiliated with Islamist groups, including those linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Tariq Ramadan, once listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and who once worked in Tony Blair’s task force designed to counter Islamic extremism, had a history of jihadist apologia; he has since been sentenced to prison for multiple rape charges.  

What many of these, and others in the Muslim world, have mastered is the art of doublespeak. They use one parlance and language for Western audiences, and another for Muslims, sometimes quite literally. That means pointing towards the marginalisation of Muslims, both real and perceived, as evidence of a targeted assault and widespread discrimination against the entire community, but whitewashing the institutionalised subjugation of religious and other minorities in the Muslim world (not to mention Muslim communities in the West).

As a result, the official Muslim representative organisations in the West largely peddle the same divisive narratives, using exactly the democratic freedoms of Western countries which they often profess to disdain. These freedoms allow open criticism of Western countries, whereas draconian, Sharia-based laws suppress any dissent in the Muslim world. This creates a gorily twisted worldview, wherein Muslims willingly living in egalitarian Western societies are seen to be persecuted, while those stuck in many Muslim-majority states are happily living under Islamic law and supposedly coexisting peacefully with their countrymen. The freedom of Muslims in the West and the oppression of both Muslims and non-Muslims in the Muslim world are omitted entirely from this narrative.

Nowhere is subservience to Islamist hegemony more apparent than in the West’s liberal and leftist circles, where gullible academics and activists are willing to abandon everything that they fight for within their own folds to accommodate, nay, celebrate, draconian Islamic codes. Amid the uproar over the Bin Laden-eulogising Ashrafi’s Lambeth Palace award, the visible erasure of the woman standing next to him is celebrated as a ‘choice’ by Western liberals. Clearly, no one has bothered to speak to the women donning misogynistic Islamic garb, almost every single one of whom would cite the reason for their ‘choice’ of apparel as stemming from their submission to Allah’s command as per Islamic scriptures. It is hardly a choice, let alone a liberal one, if it is between covering your face and burning in hellfire. And this sexist, masochistic choice is definitely not one that those who have long condemned sexism in their own religions and cultures should be defending.

In fact, for members of all other religious communities, condemning their scriptures is almost a prerequisite to gaining access to Western liberal circles. No Hindu would be offered a seat on the liberal table unless they unequivocally condemned Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, whereas no Jew would be safe from the liberal-leftist wrath unless they labelled Israel as a genocidal state and denied its right to exist. Meanwhile, not only are Muslims not expected to offer any self-reflection, it is virtually mandatory for them to be West-hating, Islam-endorsing, flagbearers of Muslim victimhood—as long as they peddle Islamist discourse in postcolonial packaging.

As a result, those individuals in Muslim communities and the Muslim world who replicate what Western liberals have done for decades, if not centuries—i.e. question, critique, condemn, even leave Islam, and prioritise this project over critiquing others—are deemed ‘Uncle Toms’ or ‘coconuts’ endorsing ‘right-wing’ narratives. If the liberal left had allowed equal-opportunity critique of Muslim ideas and communities, as it once did, the discourse around these wouldn’t have been hijacked by right-wing ideologues, and certainly not by the racist far right, as it has been. Given the uniquely political components of Islam, and its theological codification and stranglehold over Muslim communities and countries, there is hardly a cause more liberal and leftist than unabashed critique of Islam.

Nonetheless, the onus to change all this—and the only hope of it actually happening—fundamentally rests with the dissenters of the Muslim world. To expect the West, or at least its liberal left, to reconsider its sadistic surrender to Islamists as a prerequisite for a shift towards modernity in Islam is to echo what both the left and the right in the West inadvertently, even if antipodally, peddle: Western supremacy. Instead of trying to curry favour with Western liberals by pinning all the world’s evils on the West, what the Muslim world needs is more self-critique. Such a project might not be deemed award-worthy in the West, and could be fatal in the Muslim world, but it is the most likely path towards progressive reform in Muslim countries and communities the world over.