On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the mother church of Anglicanism honored a cleric who called bin Laden the “Sword of God” and hung the names of Hamas fighters in a church sanctuary. Jewish prophecy foretold this union of Christendom and Islam before the war of Gog and Magog.
After Jacob took his father’s blessing, Esau went to the house of Ishmael and married his daughter. For thousands of years, Jewish tradition has read that wedding in the Book of Genesis as a preview of the End of Days, when the heirs of Esau, the Christian West, and the heirs of Ishmael, the Islamic world, join forces against Israel in the final stage before the war of Gog and Magog. This month, in the halls of the Church of England, that wedding took place again.
On September 11, 2026, the 25th anniversary of the day al-Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, the Archbishop of Canterbury stood in the medieval halls of Lambeth Palace in London and handed an award for “Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation” to a Muslim cleric. In 2007, the same cleric had announced that Osama bin Laden deserved the title Saifullah, the “Sword of God.”
That same day, 200 miles to the north, Leeds Minster, one of the great churches of the Church of England, opened an exhibition of embroidered panels mourning Palestinians killed in Gaza. The names stitched into the cloth included at least 18 Hamas terrorists.
Both honors were withdrawn within days, but only after politicians, terror survivors and the Jewish community of Leeds raised an outcry. In a single week, the leadership of the church that gave the world the King James Bible honored the admirers and the fighters of radical Islam. Its first reflex was to defend itself.
The Church of England is a distant institution for most American evangelicals. What happened there this month carries a warning for every congregation in America, and it raises the question at the heart of Jewish prophecy: what happens when a church loses its bearings on Israel and goes looking for Ishmael?
“The Lofty Title of Islam”
The recipient of the Hubert Walter Award was Maulana Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, an umbrella group of Islamic clerics and one of Pakistan’s most influential religious bodies. Archbishop Sarah Mullally, 64, presented it to him at Lambeth Palace, her official residence. Mullally succeeded Justin Welby this year, becoming the first woman to lead the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion. Lambeth Palace praised Ashrafi for “his outstanding work as an ambassador of interfaith harmony in Pakistan, known for his commitment to promoting religious tolerance.” The citation singled out his 2012 intervention on behalf of Rimsha Masih, a Christian girl falsely accused of burning pages of the Quran.
Photographs of the ceremony began circulating on September 15. Within hours, British lawmakers were posting links to Ashrafi’s past.
In 2007, after Queen Elizabeth II knighted the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses had led Iran to call for his death, the Pakistan Ulema Council under Ashrafi announced an honor of its own. “We are pleased to award the title of Saifullah to Osama bin Laden after the British government’s decision to bestow the title of ‘Sir’ on blasphemer Rushdie,” Ashrafi said. He defended the decision in plain words. “If a blasphemer can be given the title ‘Sir’ by the West despite the fact that he’s hurt the feelings of Muslims,” Ashrafi said, “then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam: Saifullah.”
The Daily Mail unearthed more. After October 7, Ashrafi called the massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel a reply to Israel. “Hamas’s response is an answer to Israel’s atrocities,” he said. “Israel has been continuously desecrating Al-Aqsa Mosque.” In another statement, he declared that “Allah crushed the pride of Israel through the Palestinian freedom fighters.” He has praised the “mujahideen” of Iran as “standing like a wall of lead against Jews and Christians.”
Ashrafi is also a leading defender of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which carry the death penalty for insulting Muhammad. Human Rights Watch condemned the laws last year for “perpetuating religious discrimination” and for “targeting the poor and minorities in unlawful evictions and land grabs.” Pakistan’s Christians have borne the brunt of them for decades. Ashrafi insists the laws “save lives” by stopping Muslims from taking revenge for religious offenses into their own hands.
Lambeth Retreats
Reaction in Britain was fierce. “Why on earth did the Archbishop of Canterbury give an award to a man who praised Osama bin Laden?” asked Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called it “a significant lapse.” The National Secular Society called the ceremony “obscene, and almost beyond parody.” British survivors of terror attacks demanded an apology.
On September 17, Lambeth Palace gave in. “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,” its statement read. “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.”
Lambeth Palace issued no apology. Its statement offered nothing to the families of the 2,977 people murdered on September 11, 2001, and named neither bin Laden nor Hamas.
Ashrafi told the BBC that his words had been “totally taken out of context” and that he was the target of “an unfair campaign.” His spokesman said the cleric had been “giving an example” of Muslim anger over Rushdie’s knighthood.
The heaviest price may fall on the Christians the award claimed to honor. Michael Nazir-Ali, the Pakistani-born former Bishop of Rochester, warned that Pakistan’s Christians now face a backlash from extremists over Lambeth’s blunder. He demanded to know “why there was not due diligence,” and said, “some signal needs to be given that Christians in Pakistan are not responsible for whatever has happened.”
A petition calling for Mullally’s resignation passed 3,700 signatures within days. “What due diligence was undertaken before presenting such an honour, particularly on the 25th anniversary of 9/11?” it asks. Her predecessor, Justin Welby, resigned in 2024 over the Church’s failure to act on abuse.
Stitching the Names of Hamas
The Leeds exhibition, titled Stitch Their Names Together, displayed 90 embroidered panels at Leeds Minster from September 11 to 20. Each bore names of Palestinians reported killed in Gaza since October 2023. The names came from lists published by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas and makes no distinction between terrorists and civilians.
The Leeds Jewish Representative Council spent more than a week presenting evidence to the Minster. Church officials insisted they had carried out due diligence and refused to allow photographs of the panels. At least 18 known Hamas fighters were eventually identified among the names on display.
The exhibition hung in the sanctuary through Yom Kippur, the first anniversary by the Hebrew calendar of the Manchester synagogue attack. On Yom Kippur 2025, a terrorist struck the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, 40 miles from Leeds, and murdered two Jewish worshippers.
On September 20, the Minster closed the exhibition. “By hosting this exhibition we have harmed our relationship with some in the Jewish community for which we apologise and now seek to rebuild trust,” said Canon Paul Maybury.
The Leeds Jewish Representative Council was scathing. “This debacle has set community relations back by years,” a spokesperson said. “At a time where we have seen a rising antisemitism that goes beyond living memory in this city, it is simply astonishing that clergy and trustees of an important church should behave in this way.”
The organizer, Mary Evers, called the criticism “a brazen attempt to smear and delegitimise the love and empathy of hundreds of stitchers.”
The Archbishop in Birzeit
The Lambeth award followed a summer in which the Archbishop made her sympathies clear. In June, Mullally made her first pilgrimage to the Holy Land as Archbishop, and on June 21 she became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to preach in Birzeit, a Palestinian Christian town north of Jerusalem. “I will use my role as archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve,” she told the congregation. She praised their “faithful, hopeful resistance” and their “ongoing struggle for freedom and dignity.”
She then turned to the Gospels to describe the Jewish state. “In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is speaking to a community living in fear; his own people living in an occupied land and under foreign rule,” Mullally preached. Jesus’s own people were the Jews of Judea, and the foreign occupier was Rome. In the Archbishop’s sermon, the descendants of that Jewish community were cast as the occupiers.
In a pastoral letter issued during the trip, Mullally called for “a credible path towards ending the occupation” and endorsed “Hashemite custodianship” of Jerusalem’s holy sites, meaning Jordanian control over the Temple Mount.
In Birzeit, the Archbishop visited the home of Layan Nasir, a young Anglican woman released in May after repeated Israeli detention, and called her imprisonment a “terrible ordeal.” According to the Middle East Forum, Nasir led the student wing at Birzeit University of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States. An Israeli military court convicted her in September 2025 and sentenced her to seven and a half months in prison. The Forum published a photograph of the Archbishop praying in the family’s living room beneath a portrait of Kamal Nasser, Layan’s great-uncle and a senior PLO spokesman, whom the Forum links to the Black September terrorists behind the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Forum reports that Mullally also met Zeina Barbar, the daughter of a convicted PFLP terrorist, who was herself detained on suspicion of terrorism.
Christians United for Israel UK noted that the Archbishop’s published itinerary included no visit to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the City of David, Yad Vashem, or any of the communities destroyed on October 7. The group called the trip “a distorted view that serves the Palestinian liberation narrative.”
From the Throne Down
The Archbishop is the spiritual leader of the Church of England, but the church has a Supreme Governor, and he sits on the British throne. King Charles III, who swore at his coronation to be “Defender of the Faith,” has long shown a warmth toward Islam that he has rarely shown the Jewish state.
As this reporter wrote in April, Buckingham Palace confirmed that the King would issue no Easter message in 2026. Weeks earlier, his official account wished Muslims a “blessed and peaceful Ramadan” under the Arabic greeting “Ramadan Mubarak,” posted on Shrove Tuesday, the eve of Lent. In 2025, Charles opened Windsor Castle to a Ramadan iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast, for the first time in the castle’s thousand-year history. That July, he cut the ribbon on the newly named King Charles III wing of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.
His view of the Jewish state goes back decades. In a 1986 letter revealed in 2017, written after an official tour of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar, the then-Prince of Wales blamed Arab anger on the “influx of foreign, European Jews” into the Land of Israel.
The attitude of the throne has spread down through the church. During Ramadan this year, Winchester Cathedral hosted an iftar, following Bristol Cathedral, which hosted them in 2024 and 2025 and made room outside the building for the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer. In March, a Church of England primary school in Lincolnshire had children practice the movements of Islamic prayer on prayer mats. “We did prayers to Allah yesterday,” one girl told her father.
Esau Takes the Daughter of Ishmael
The Bible records a marriage that the Jewish tradition has never stopped reading as a sign of things to come. After Jacob received his father’s blessing, Esau made a choice.
“And Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan pleased not Isaac his father; so Esau went unto Ishmael, and took unto the wives that he had Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebaioth, to be his wife” (Genesis 28:8–9).
The Sages identified Esau, whose descendants are called Edom, with Rome. As Rome embraced Christianity, Jewish tradition carried that identification forward to the Christian empires that inherited its power. Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son, became in Jewish tradition the father of the Arab peoples and, later, of the Islamic world. Esau went to Ishmael after losing the blessing to Jacob. The two sons who were passed over joined together against the one who received the birthright.
The Sages stated a principle about Esau that has held for three thousand years. Rashi, citing the Sifrei in his commentary on Genesis 33:4, writes: halacha hi, b’yadua she’Esav sonei l’Yaakov, “it is a well-known law that Esau hates Jacob.”
The Archbishop’s sermon in Birzeit carried out the ancient reversal in a single sentence. She took the Jews of Judea, who suffered under Roman occupation, and recast their descendants as Rome. For most of its history, Christendom taught that it had replaced Israel as God’s chosen people. In 2019, the Church of England formally repented of that teaching in a document titled God’s Unfailing Word. Seven years later, its archbishop preaches Israel as the occupier, prays beneath the portrait of a PLO spokesman, and honors a cleric who called October 7 an answer to Israel.
King David described this alliance in a psalm that names both brothers.
“They hold crafty converse against Thy people, and take counsel against Thy treasured ones. They have said: ‘Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.’ For they have consulted together with one consent; against Thee do they make a covenant; the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites” (Psalms 83:4–7).
Edom and Ishmael stand side by side in the psalm, and David calls their alliance a covenant “against Thee.” A covenant against Israel is a covenant against the God of Israel.
The Alliance Before Gog and Magog
The Sages taught that the marriage of Esau and Ishmael’s daughter was more than a family matter. It was a preview of the final chapter of history. The Yalkut Shimoni, the medieval anthology of rabbinic teachings on the Bible, describes an alliance between Ishmael and Esau that comes before the final redemption. Rabbi Yechiel Weitzman, author of The Ishmaelite Exile, explained what that means. “The last stage in the process of Israel’s perfection will be characterized by the alliance between Ishmael and Esav, an alliance aimed at tormenting the entire world and the Jewish people in particular,” Rabbi Weitzman wrote. “At the very outset of history, Ishmael and Esav forged a bond through marriage. And so it shall be at the End of Days. The alliance between them will bring history to its culmination in the redemption.”
Rabbi Weitzman cites a prophecy attributed to Jonathan ben Uzziel, the first-century sage and student of Hillel. It describes a fleet setting out from Rome to join forces with a legion from Constantinople, the future capital of the Ottoman caliphate, to “subjugate the descendants of Eber,” the Hebrews. The prophecy ends with a promise: “In the end, they, too, will fall into the hand of Moshiach (Messiah), and will perish forevermore.”
Rabbi Pinchas Winston, a prolific author on the End of Days, traces the alliance to the teachings of the Vilna Gaon, the 18th-century sage of Lithuania, as recorded in Kol HaTor (The Voice of the Turtledove) by the Gaon’s student, Rabbi Hillel Rivlin of Shklov. “There are three klipot (husks of impurity): Esav, Ishmael, and Erev Rav,” Rabbi Winston explained. The Erev Rav is the “mixed multitude” that left Egypt with Israel and, in Jewish mystical teaching, works against Israel from within. “Esav comes to destroy Moshiach ben Yosef just as Ishmael comes to destroy Moshiach ben David,” Rabbi Winston said, referring to the two messianic figures of Jewish tradition. The Messiah son of Joseph leads Israel’s physical and national restoration, and the Messiah son of David completes the redemption.
“Esav and Ishmael are intrinsically linked, and this connection has kabbalistic roots with Moshiach implications,” Rabbi Winston said. “That is why Esav marries Machala, the daughter of Ishmael; to forge an evil alliance against the descendants of Yaakov.” In the war of Gog and Magog, he teaches, the two brothers set aside their own rivalry and march together against Israel. “They come together against Israel, though they are still at odds with each other,” Rabbi Winston said.
Rabbi Winston has pointed to the reversal that makes the alliance possible. The democratic West should naturally stand with democratic Israel against its enemies. Instead, he said, the West has “confused David for Goliath and Goliath for David.”
The Esau of the prophecy has many faces. Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, has removed his shoes to walk through the great mosques of Istanbul and Algiers. In Birzeit, the Archbishop of Canterbury recast the Jews as Rome. At Windsor, the King of England opened his castle to Ramadan while his palace skipped Easter. And at Lambeth Palace, on the anniversary of 9/11, the Church of England honored a cleric who called bin Laden the Sword of God. Each is a step in Esau’s march toward Ishmael’s tent, and each was foreseen in the opening book of the Bible as a stage on the road to redemption.
The churches of America have a choice to make. God gave Abraham the promise that governs the fate of every nation and every church: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee will I curse; and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). The Church of England has cast its lot with Esau’s alliance. Its pews are emptying, and its cathedrals are hosting iftars. Across America, millions of Christians who bless Israel, pray for Jerusalem, and stand with the Jewish people have chosen Abraham’s blessing. The Bible records how Esau’s road ends. Jacob and the blessing endure.
