Archbishop of Canterbury Withdraws Interfaith Award

The Archbishop of Canterbury has withdrawn an award she presented six days earlier.

Lambeth Palace confirmed on 17 September that the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation had been taken back from Maulana Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi. The award is one of five Lambeth Awards, and it is named after an archbishop who is buried in Canterbury Cathedral.

The ceremony itself was held at Lambeth Palace in London, not in Canterbury. It was the first set of Lambeth Awards presented by Sarah Mullally, who was installed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury at the cathedral in March.

What Lambeth Palace said

The statement was published on the archbishop’s website on 17 September. It runs to two paragraphs.

It sets out why the award was given in the first place. The honour was “for Imam Ashrafi’s longstanding support for religious minorities in Pakistan, particularly the Christian community, support that is valued by many Christians in Pakistan including its Anglican Church”.

It then says the award has gone:

It is a longstanding principle of interfaith dialogue and co-operation that we must engage with one another across deeply-held differences, and that remains the case. However, previous comments made by Imam Ashrafi have come to light that have led Lambeth Palace to reconsider this award and we can now confirm today that the award has been withdrawn.

The statement adds that Lambeth Palace has contacted Imam Ashrafi to make him aware of the decision. It does not say what the previous comments were, when they were made, or who raised them.

The ceremony, and the 27 people honoured

The awards were presented in the Great Hall of Lambeth Palace on Friday 11 September, the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The archbishop’s office published the full list three days later, on 14 September.

That page records:

• 27 people presented with a Lambeth Award
• five categories: the Canterbury Cross, the Cross of St Augustine, the Hubert Walter Award, the Langton Award and the Lanfranc Award
• 12 of the 27 receiving the Canterbury Cross for Services to the Church of England
• two posthumous awards, to Lambeth Palace staff who died in service

Four people were given the Hubert Walter Award this year:

• the Reverend Elizabeth Carnelley, for her work on the Near Neighbours Programme
• Dr Barbara Schwepcke
• the late Reverend Dr Richard J Sudworth OBE, the Church of England’s National Inter-Religious Affairs Adviser, who died in service
• Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi

In her welcome, Archbishop Sarah said the awards were “an opportunity to acknowledge that valuable work and those often unseen efforts of people determined to make a difference, determined to be hope in this world”.

The award is named after an archbishop buried in the cathedral

The Canterbury connection is in the name. The Hubert Walter Award was first given in March 2016. The archbishop’s own description of the awards says it is named after Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1193 to 1205, “who had dialogue with non-Christians at a time of inter-faith conflict”.

The same page says the medal’s design “incorporates a scarab beetle, a motif favoured by Archbishop Walter, which some scholars believe may have denoted the resurrection”. That description is on the Archbishop’s Awards page kept on the archbishop’s website from the previous archbishop’s tenure.

Hubert Walter is still in Canterbury. His Purbeck marble tomb sits in the Trinity Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral, and the Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society records that it is the oldest tomb in the building, and the only one placed in the Trinity Chapel before the shrine to Thomas Becket was built.

Six heads are carved on its sloping roof. The society notes that one of them, the first from the left on the tomb front, is supposedly Saladin, the Muslim ruler Walter dealt with on the Third Crusade. The tomb was opened in 1890, which is how the occupant was finally identified. A lead slate bearing the name Hubert settled it, and the vestments, staff, chalice and mitre found inside are now held in the cathedral Treasury.

The list still names him

The withdrawal has not yet reached the recipient list. Checked on the morning of Friday 18 September, the archbishop’s 14 September news page still carries the line “Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, The Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation” in its full list of recipients, with no note attached.

Neither of Canterbury’s own Anglican institutions has said anything about it:

• Canterbury Cathedral’s news page carries nothing on the awards. Its most recent item is dated 14 August.
• The Diocese of Canterbury has published nothing on it either. Its latest item, on 16 September, is about new Readers.

What Imam Ashrafi says

Imam Ashrafi has disputed how his earlier remarks have been read. In comments reported by the Pakistani newspaper The News, he said his 2007 remarks were made in the context of the British government honouring the author Salman Rushdie, and that he had been drawing a comparison rather than conferring an honour.

He also rejected claims that he had justified suicide attacks, saying the Pakistan Ulema Council, which he chairs, had issued a fatwa against suicide attacks and the killing of innocent people during his chairmanship.

We have not reported the wording of the 2007 remarks, because Lambeth Palace has not specified which comments led to its decision.

When these nominations were actually made

One detail explains how a nomination round and an archbishop can end up out of step.

The archbishop’s awards page records that nominations for the 2025 round of Lambeth Awards closed on 30 November 2024, that no awards were made in 2025, and that those nominations “will now be considered for 2026”. That deadline fell nearly 16 months before the present archbishop was installed.

Sarah Mullally was installed at Canterbury Cathedral on Wednesday 25 March 2026, the Feast of the Annunciation. The cathedral described the service as marking “the symbolic start of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s public ministry in the Church of England and across the Anglican Communion”, and it was broadcast live on BBC One.

What it means for you

If you live in the district, the practical position is narrower than the headlines suggest.

• The Lambeth Awards are run from London. They are the personal awards of the Archbishop of Canterbury, administered at Lambeth Palace. Canterbury Cathedral and the Diocese of Canterbury do not select them and had no part in this one.
• Nothing about the cathedral’s services or opening has changed. The withdrawal concerns an award, not an appointment or a post.
• You can read both documents in full. The award announcement and the withdrawal statement are short, and both are on the archbishop’s own website.
• The tomb is open to visitors. Hubert Walter’s tomb stands in the Trinity Chapel, near the site of the Becket shrine, and is part of the normal cathedral route. If you are driving in to see it, our guide to parking in Canterbury covers the city car parks and the park and ride, and Canterbury roadworks and travel has this week’s closures.

We will update this page if Lambeth Palace, the cathedral or the diocese says anything further.

Update, 23 September 2026

The recipient list has now been changed. Reading the 14 September page again on 23 September, the line naming Imam Ashrafi is gone. Nothing else on the page has been altered, so it now states in its opening paragraph that the ceremony “saw 27 people presented with a Lambeth Award” while listing 26 names below. The Hubert Walter Award now shows three recipients rather than four. There is no correction note, and Lambeth Palace has published no second statement.

A petition calling for the Archbishop to resign has meanwhile passed 8,500 signatures. It was started in December 2025 and its grounds are safeguarding, not this award. We have covered it separately in Archbishop of Canterbury Resignation Petition Tops 8,500.