When future historians comb through the wreckage of the woke era, for clues as to what went wrong, one artefact in particular will startle them. It’s a photograph. It was taken on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And it shows the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, sporting a smug liberal grin as she hands an award for ‘interfaith cooperation’ to some big Muslim fella. Who is he? Only someone who once gushed over Osama bin Laden, even bestowing upon him the honorific of ‘Sword of Allah’ for his lifetime of ‘fighting for Islam’.

Take that in. On the 25th anniversary of the apocalyptic barbarism unleashed on America by Osama bin Laden and his fash ‘mujahideen’, the spiritual leader of the Church of England was rubbing shoulders with a one-time OBL praiser. As our American cousins wept for loved ones who were burnt alive by al-Qaeda, England’s top bishop was smirking in the company of a bloke who once celebrated al-Qaeda’s leader as a ‘mujahid’ loved by God. If you were to put such a scene in a novel satirising the suicidal lunacy of woke, your editor would chastise you for overkill.

The man in the pic is Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi. What he lacks in principle he more than makes up for with names. He’s chairman of the All Pakistan Ulema Council. The CofE’s justification for giving him the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation is that he once intervened in the case of a Pakistani Christian girl who’d been falsely accused of blasphemy. It was ‘outstanding work’, chirped the church, demonstrating Ashrafi’s ‘unwavering commitment to promoting religious tolerance’. Are you on drugs? Does Lambeth Palace not have the internet? Did not one person in the archbishop’s orbit think to spend three minutes on Google to check if Ashrafi really is a drippy hippy in a smock?

If they had, they’d have discovered that ‘religious tolerance’ is not quite his bag. They’d have found that Ashrafi and his batshit council were so horrified when the ‘blasphemer’ Salman Rushdie was knighted in 2007 that they retaliated by exalting bin Laden. Ashrafi said at the time: ‘If a blasphemer can be given the title “Sir” by the West despite the fact that he’s hurt the feelings of Muslims’ – ya big baby! – ‘then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam: Saifullah.’

There are old news reports about Ashrafi’s tit-for-tat honouring of the Islamofascist butcher of al-Qaeda all over the internet. I don’t know what’s worse: the CofE’s spiritual lethargy or its digital incompetence. What’s more, while Ashrafi may have sided with a Christian girl being menaced by a mob of Koran-bashers, he still fervently backs Pakistan’s barbaric blasphemy law. ‘There is no problem with the law’, he said in 2012. This is a law that makes it a capital offence to diss Muhammad. It’s a law under which more than 2,000 people have been prosecuted since the 1980s. And Ashrafi is fine with it.

Lambeth Palace has now rescinded the award, citing Ashrafi’s ‘previous comments’. This is not good enough. It was a sickening betrayal of our American allies for the spiritual leader of the English church to use the anniversary of 9/11 to fawn over a man who once honoured bin Laden. And it was an act of moral treachery against the Christians of Pakistan. Imagine you’re a Pakistani follower of Christ, your beliefs violently hated by Islamo-nutters, and you see no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury gurning with a man who backs the laws that make your life a misery and a minefield. If the church has even the tiniest remaining fibre of moral decency, it won’t just withdraw the award: it will put the archbishop herself in front of the cameras to explain her grotesque moral failings.

Then there’s the photograph. Mark my words, it will one day be treated as a historic document of the West’s descent into the bottomless chasm of cultural relativism. Doolally Mullally hands the award to a grinning Ashrafi. His wife is in the pic too, but we have no idea what expression she is wearing because she is wrapped head to toe in the misogynist black bag called a niqab. You can just about see her eyes peeping through her ninja get-up. Much was made of Mullally being the first-ever female Archbishop of Canterbury, yet here she is smiling next to a woman whose sinful flesh has been cloaked upon the orders of Islamic obscurantism. It feels jarring, chilling.

What has become of the Church of England? One by one it has sacrificed its beliefs at the altar of woke. It has eased up on Hell, calling it a mere state of non-being rather than eternal torment. It started blessing same-sex unions but said it’s still ‘dishonourable’ to have gay sex. It later removed the word ‘dishonourable’. Confusing much? It has all but abandoned Christianity’s core belief – that Christ is the only route to salvation – and now says ‘God’s grace’ can be found in other religions, too. Presumably even in religions that stone to death apostates and put women in binbags. And it now obsessively flagellates itself over the long-gone crime of slavery, its hallowed halls having clearly been infiltrated by the whackjob cult of Western self-loathing.

Remember this image of one of the highest moral stewards in Christendom decorating a hardline Muslim cleric as his cloaked wife is barely able to look on. For it embodies, in all its grimness, the moral suicide of the West, our wilful immolation of our traditions and beliefs to appease the false god of multiculturalism. In more serious times, the archbishop would have considered his / her position following a spiritual scandal as vast and nauseating as this. Let’s see what Mullally does.