Michael James Nazir-Ali (Urdu: مائیکل نذیر علی; born 19 August 1949) is a Pakistani-born British Catholic priest and former Anglican bishop. He served as the 106th Bishop of Rochester from 1994 to 2009 and, before that, as Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan. He is currently the director of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue.
In 2021, he was received into the Catholic Church and was ordained as a priest for the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham on 30 October 2021, one of several Anglican bishops who converted to Catholicism that year. In 2022, he was made a monsignor and Prelate of Honour of His Holiness to the Holy See. He is a dual citizen of Pakistan and Britain.
Michael Nazir-Ali was born in Karachi, Pakistan, on 19 August 1949, the son of James and Patience Nazir-Ali. He has both a Christian and a Muslim family background – his father's family are Sayyids. His father converted from Shia Islam. He attended the Roman Catholic-run St Paul's School and St Patrick's College in Karachi and attended Roman Catholic services there. He began identifying as a Christian at the age of 15; he was formally received into the Anglican Church of Pakistan aged 20.
Nazir-Ali attended St Paul's English High School, Karachi, and St Patrick's College and later studied economics, Islamic history and sociology at the University of Karachi (BA 1970). He studied in preparation for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge (1972), and undertook postgraduate studies in theology at St Edmund Hall, Oxford (BLitt (Oxon, 1974), MLitt (Oxon, 1981), Hon. Fellow, 1999), Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (MLitt (Cantab, 1976)) and the Australian College of Theology (ThD 1983).
He also studied at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. In 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree by Westminster College, Pennsylvania, and in 2005 the Lambeth DD.
His particular academic interests include comparative literature and comparative philosophy of religion. He also has a number of honorary degrees.
In addition to teaching appointments in colleges and universities in many parts of the world, he has been a tutorial supervisor at the University of Cambridge, a senior tutor at Karachi Theological College and Visiting Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Greenwich. He has been elected an honorary fellow of his colleges at Oxford (St Edmund Hall) and Cambridge (Fitzwilliam). From 1986 until 1989, while he was assistant to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Co-ordinator of Studies and Education for the Lambeth Conference, he was an honorary curate of St Giles' Church, and St Margaret's Church, both in Oxford. In 2010, he was appointed as a senior fellow of Wycliffe Hall and is on the faculty of the London School of Theology, the Lahore College of Theology, the Alexandria School of Theology and the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS).
He has been invited to lecture as Professor of Theology, at the University of St Thomas or the Angelicum in Rome from 2022.
He understands English, Arabic, Persian, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Latin.
Ordained ministry and public career
Nazir-Ali was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1976 in the Church of Pakistan and worked in Karachi and Lahore. He became the first Bishop of Raiwind in West Punjab (1984–86), at the time he was the youngest bishop in the Anglican Communion. When his life was endangered in Pakistan in 1986, Robert Runcie, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, arranged for his refuge in England. Nazir-Ali said, "the reason behind some of the difficulties I was facing was removed when General Zia was killed – unfortunately for him, and I am now not doing the work that I was doing at the time with the very poor". He became an assistant to the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth and assisted with the planning of the 1988 Lambeth Conference; he was general secretary of the Church Mission Society 1989–1994 and concurrently an assistant bishop in the Diocese of Southwark.
Nazir-Ali was appointed Bishop of Rochester, England, in 1994 and, in 1999, entered the House of Lords as one of the Lords Spiritual because of his seniority in episcopal office, the first religious leader from Asia to serve there. He was one of the final two candidates for Archbishop of Canterbury, though Rowan Williams was appointed on the recommendation of the British prime minister, Tony Blair.
From 1997 to 2003, Nazir-Ali was chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's ethics and law committee. He was a leader of the Network for Inter-faith Concerns of the Anglican Communion. and led the dialogue with Al-Azhar. He is also a founding member of the Dialogue of Scholars founded after the 9/11 attacks. For many years, he served as a member of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) and, more latterly, of the International Anglican–Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM).
From 2010, Nazir-Ali was the visiting bishop of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina in the United States. The diocese was part of the Episcopal Church in the United States but left it to join the Anglican Church in North America which is not a church in the Anglican Communion but is widely recognised by Anglican churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America (the Global South).
Ordination in the Roman Catholic Church
On 29 September 2021, Nazir-Ali was received into the Catholic Church by the ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Monsignor Keith Newton. He was ordained as a deacon by Archbishop Kevin McDonald on 28 October 2021 at St Mary's College, Oscott, and a priest by Cardinal Vincent Nichols on 30 October 2021 at Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory Catholic Church in London. On 6 April 2022, Pope Francis granted Nazir-Ali the title of Prelate of Honour of His Holiness.
Nazir-Ali was generally regarded as being on the Evangelical wing of Anglicanism but described himself as being "Catholic and evangelical".
He is familiar with a number of Middle Eastern, Asian and European languages and has played a significant role in the Church of England's ecumenical and interfaith dialogues.