Nothing ‘Came to Light’. You Failed to Look
The award has been withdrawn. The governance failure that allowed it through still needs explaining.
Days after Sarah Mullally presented Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi with the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation, Lambeth Palace withdrew it.
Its official statement says previous comments concerning Osama bin Laden had “come to light”. Ashrafi disputes the interpretation of those comments and says they have been taken out of context. But they weren’t new. The comments were nearly two decades old and had previously been publicly reported.
Then there is the date. The award was presented on 11 September, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. That doesn’t change the substance of Ashrafi’s work or determine how his historical comments should be interpreted. But from a governance and reputational-risk perspective, the optics should have been glaringly obvious.
Presenting an award for reconciliation and interfaith cooperation on that particular anniversary should surely have prompted particularly careful scrutiny of the recipient and their public record.
So, who checked?
We know that Bishop Azad Marshall, Moderator of the Church of Pakistan, has said that he personally recommended Ashrafi for the award. But a recommendation should not amount to approval.
What due diligence happened at Lambeth Palace? What was Sarah told? Who advised her? And who ultimately signed this off?
If nobody found the historical material, the checking process appears woefully inadequate. If somebody did find it, the questions become even more uncomfortable: who knew, what advice was given, and why did the award proceed?
There is another possibility worth asking about. Was Sarah simply badly advised, or was she set up to fail?
There is no evidence of deliberate sabotage. But given the circumstances, it is entirely reasonable to ask how a new Archbishop was allowed to walk into such an avoidable and predictable controversy.
Sarah cannot escape responsibility. The award was made under her authority. Leadership means owning decisions made in your name. But accountability cannot stop with her.
If Sarah wasn’t given relevant information, we need to know why. If the information was available to those advising her, we need to know what happened to it. And if nobody bothered to look properly in the first place, Lambeth Palace has a rather more fundamental governance problem.
An “urgent review” afterwards isn’t due diligence. It’s damage control.
The Church of England has become remarkably good at things suddenly “coming to light”.
The trouble with keeping things buried is that somebody always brings a shovel.
~Michelle Burns
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