New Delhi: Pakistan’s prominent fundamentalist cleric Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, who is now the religious coordinator for the Shehbaz Sharif government, received an award from the Archbishop of Canterbury for religious harmony on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Within a week, he was stripped of the award.
A Telegraph report this week revealed that his brother, Hassan Muawiya Ashrafi, was involved in a nexus that used Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to abduct, intimidate, and extort men. Hassan had filed 26 blasphemy complaints over a four-year period, the maximum by an individual in Pakistan, as per rights groups.
Tahir Ashrafi, a former special envoy on interfaith harmony in the Imran Khan government, has spent years presenting himself as a bridge between the government, religious minorities, and conservative Muslim groups.
On 11 September, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, presented him with the Hubert Walter Award at a ceremony in London. The award, which cited his commitment to religious tolerance, was withdrawn after reports surfaced that Tahir Ashrafi had previously praised Osama bin Laden. In a 2007 interview to AFP, Ashrafi, as the head of the Pakistan Ulema council, had said that his council was giving bin Laden the “highest title for a Muslim warrior” in protest against Britain awarding Salman Rushdie a knighthood.