He served as the th Bishop of Rochester from to and, before that, as Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan. In , he was received into the Catholic Church and was ordained as a priest for the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham on 30 October , [ 2 ] one of several Anglican bishops who converted to Catholicism that year. He is a dual citizen of Pakistan and Britain. He began identifying as a Christian at the age of 15; he was formally received into the Anglican Church of Pakistan aged 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 became the first Bishop of Raiwind in West Punjab โ86 , at the time he was the youngest bishop in the Anglican Communion. When his life was endangered in Pakistan in , [ 8 ] 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 โ unfortunately for him, and I am now not doing the work that I was doing at the time with the very poor".
Nazir-Ali was appointed Bishop of Rochester , England, in and, in , 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 to , Nazir-Ali was chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority 's ethics and law committee. Nazir-Ali was generally regarded as being on the Evangelical wing of Anglicanism but described himself as being " Catholic and evangelical ". At first Nazir-Ali supported the ordination of women as priests in the Church of England.
