Ahmadiyya Islam and the Muslim Diaspora

Living at the End of Days

Marzia Balzani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351769532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi asiatico-americani

This book is a study of the UK-based Ahmadiyya Muslim community in the context of the twentieth-century South Asian diaspora. Originating in late nineteenth-century Punjab, the Ahmadis are today a vibrant international religious movement; they are also a group that has been declared heretic by other Muslims and one that continues to face persecution in Pakistan, the country the Ahmadis made their home after the partition of India in 1947.

Structured as a series of case studies, the book focuses on the ways in which the Ahmadis balance the demands of faith, community and modern life in the diaspora. Following an overview of the history and beliefs of the Ahmadis, the chapters examine in turn the use of ceremonial occasions to consolidate a diverse international community; the paradoxical survival of the enchantments of dreams and charisma within the structures of an institutional bureaucracy; asylum claims and the ways in which the plight of asylum seekers has been strategically deployed to position the Ahmadis on the UK political stage; and how the planning and building of mosques serves to establish a home within the diaspora.

Based on fieldwork conducted over several years in a range of formal and informal contexts, this timely book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience from social and cultural anthropology, South Asian studies, the study of Islam and of Muslims in Europe, refugee, asylum and diaspora studies, as well as more generally religious studies and history.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Sameness and difference

Situating the Ahmadis

A people out of place

A recent Islamic studies textbook for sixth graders, serving the requirement for compulsory faith education and prepared in accordance with the guidelines ‘given by the Federal Ministry of Education, Pakistan’, characterized the history and beliefs of the Ahmadi Muslims for its readership of 11-year-olds as follows:

The British hatched numerous conspiracies during the freedom movement to delink Muslims from their faith. They were keen on mitigating the love of the prophet (PBUH) from the hearts of Muslims. In 1891, under the patronage of the British, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, a liar, made a false claim to prophethood. His disciples too falsely pose to be Muslims. Accordingly, after the establishment of Pakistan, on December 7, 1977 (sic, for 7 September 1974), it was legislated by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan that no Qadiani can deceive the Muslims by calling himself a Muslim, because anyone who believes anyone to be a prophet after the Holy Prophet (PBUH) becomes an infidel (Kafir).

(AHRC and IHRC 2015:138)

Although the message here seems quite unambiguous, the ‘instructions for teaching staff’ drive it home by explaining that, ‘having got the lesson’, the students ‘should become aware of the evil of Qadianis [Ahmadis]’ (AHRC and IHRC 2015:138).

Generations of Pakistanis have grown up with and absorbed one version or another of this account of Ahmadi history and theology, especially those whose lives have been shaped by the ever greater Islamicization of Pakistan over the last 50 years. It is accounts like these that have been repeated, embroidered and legitimized in schools and madrassas, in the popular media, in sermons and in state discourse. And these accounts are today widely disseminated globally, throughout the Muslim diaspora and its presence on online social media.

A UN report on education and religious discrimination in Pakistan found evidence in ‘interviews with public school and madrassa teachers … that they had limited awareness or understanding of religious minorities and their beliefs, and were divided on whether a religious minority was a citizen’. The report further concluded that ‘views expressed by teachers about Ahmadis, Christians, and Jews often were very negative. Interviews showed that these biased sentiments were transmitted and held by the students’ (in Hussain, Salim and Naveed 2011:11). During the rule of Zia ul Haq (1977–1988), the number of madrassas doubled and the education system was reformed to ‘implement the Islamic principles and protect the Pakistani ideology’, which required a review of secondary and tertiary level teaching materials to ensure that they complied with this ‘Pakistani ideology’. During this time:

[n]ational history was presented as a string of events leading to the idea of creating an Islamic state. In libraries, secular and purely scientific books that were unrelated to religion were gradually replaced by religious literature. The study of Arabic and Islamic history and traditions was given impetus. The authorities simultaneously reduced allocations for secular education.

(Belokrenitsky and Moskalenko 2013:284)

The extract from the Islamiat for Class VI textbook confirms the findings of the UN report and offers a telling example of the ways in which Ahmadis have been positioned within narratives of national history and state building, and of the role they have been made to play as scapegoat in the project of consolidating an orthodox and increasingly intolerant community of faith. And to the extent that the text follows not only the guidance of the Ministry of Education but also the pronouncements of many religious leaders, it allows us a glimpse into the role played by state, cultural and religious institutions in determining the fate of the Ahmadis of Pakistan. These are the concerns of this introductory chapter.

The origins of the animus directed at the Ahmadis by other Muslims reside in the ways in which the claims of prophethood made by Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of Ahmadiyya Islam, have been understood and misunderstood over many years. During the late years of the nineteenth century, Ahmad claimed to be a mujaddid (renewer of the faith), masih mau’ud (the promised messiah) and the mahdi (the rightly guided one who will appear at the end times together with the messiah). For many Muslim individuals and institutions, the Ahmadi attempts to reconcile these claims with the belief in the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood, a core tenet of Islam, are merely forms of sophistry designed to disguise what they see as heresy. Grasping these differences and disagreements is essential for understanding the place of the Ahmadis in the Muslim world (and I return to the issue of prophethood in more detail shortly). But focusing on doctrinal differences obscures from view what is a no less important social and cultural sameness. From this perspective, the vehemence of the demonization of the Ahmadis in the textbook extract quoted at the start of the chapter can be read not so much as a statement of the obvious but as an anxious effort to make visible what may not otherwise be visible. After all, the Ahmadis in many respects behave like good Muslims, observe the same rituals and practices, study the same religious texts and, in Pakistan, they eat the same food, wear the same clothes and speak the same languages as other Pakistanis. And it is precisely here that the fear enters of the outsider who can pass as an insider, the enemy within, and hence the justification and need for ever finer and more precise definitions of who is a genuine insider and the lurking suspicion that even this is not enough to ensure that everyone is clearly and unambiguously classified.

In addition to the forms of their daily lives and many of their beliefs and rituals, the relocation of the Ahmadis to Pakistan at partition, and then migration to the UK mirrors in many respects the transnational migration patterns of many South Asians over the last century, moving from one nation to another in the subcontinent or Africa before heading west to Europe or North America. Yet Ahmadis, rather than being studied for the many similarities they share with other South Asian groups, including shared experiences of colonialism, migration and sectarian and communal conflicts, have often been studied in terms limited to their distinctive beliefs and the socio-political consequences of their adherence to these beliefs. Past studies have, inevitably, focused on what is different about the Ahmadis, and this often then serves as some kind of self-evident explanation, almost as though it were natural, as to why Ahmadis have been targeted by other Muslim groups, leading to the apparently inevitable political, social and religious forms of persecution they have been subject to in South Asia, and increasingly also in other Muslim majority states such as Indonesia and Algeria.

Here, while not ignoring or playing down some of the clearly distinctive features of Ahmadi Islam, I seek to understand just what is the same about the Ahmadis and other Muslim sects and minorities, so that their exclusion from Islam in the Pakistan government’s declaration that Ahmadis are not Muslim in 1974 has to be explained and not simply accepted as self-evident and inevitable. Further, given that exclusion from the fold of Islam does not necessarily have to lead to automatic social and political discrimination or justify the use of violence, this too needs to be explained.¹ Ahmadis are not marginalized, scapegoated and persecuted simply because they have been declared non-Muslim but because of their complex social and political contextual location in colonial India, post-colonial Pakistan and in today’s globalized society. Understanding the logic of the processes that led to the exclusion of Ahmadiyya Muslims from Islam in Pakistan also serves to outline the similar processes that have resulted in the marginalization of Hindus and Christians and the sectarian violence against Shi‘a Muslims, which has also taken place in Pakistan over recent decades. Pakistan, contrary to the explicitly stated intent of its first governor-general, is based on a modern conjunction of religion and state, a vision of the state as Islamic defined so as to limit the rights of, and over time increasingly exclude, all those who do not meet the officially mandated definition of Muslim. The Islamic state project that is Pakistan, through state processes which have, among other things, curtailed forms of Sufi traditional practice and made a narrow and ideological form of Islamiat education compulsory in state education, has made it possible for those who can identify as Sunni Muslim to be ‘citizens who belong’ and for all others to be rendered citizens who ‘belong less’ (Geschiere 2009:100; Ewing 1983; Leirvik 2008). And, in brief, it is these processes that go some way to explain why the almost 23% non-Muslim religious minority population of Pakistan in 1947 declined to a mere 3% by 2013 (Ispahani 2013; Hadi 2015).²

It is in the particularities of the sameness and difference of Ahmadi Muslims to other Muslim groups and other minorities,³ and how these have changed over time and across national territorial space that makes it possible to begin to understand how one group that shares, in many respects, the features of many other similar Muslim groups is singled out for particular scrutiny and treatment. This scrutiny and treatment have not remained the same since the foundation of Ahmadiyya Islam some 130 years ago. Just as the Ahmadis themselves have developed institutionally and reacted to change, so too have those who seek to curtail their influence and destroy them.

I am here drawing upon Appadurai’s suggestion that some minorities may be subject to violence from a majority not because of their differences but because of their similarities, or more precisely, because they blur the boundaries between groups, being both ‘ “us” and “them”, here and there … loyal and disloyal … [and are] unwelcome because of their anomalous identities and attachments’ (Appadurai 2006:44). Appadurai is, of course, drawing upon Douglas’ (1984) insight that dirt is matter out of place and results from a given system of classification. And recognizing a group as metaphorical ‘dirt’ that does not fit the system requires that everyone be classified as belonging clearly and unequivocally to one category or another. Those who are then in the majority group may displace social anxieties on to the minority group, but this group may be particularly problematic to locate if distinguishing between them and the majority is not always straightforward.

The kind of overlapping and mixed identities described by Appadurai raise questions about possibly divided loyalties, and in the case of the Ahmadis these have been described in terms of what some have called their ‘state within a state’, a reference to Rabwah, the town they built in Pakistan after partition, as well as a suggestion that their loyalties are primarily to governments and ideologies located outside Pakistan (e.g. Zaheer 1984).⁴ The processes needed to turn a numerical minority such as the Ahmadis into such a significant threat to the state that it has to be eliminated then becomes one that requires, as Appadurai notes, ‘regularly mobilized and reawakened … powerful campaigns of … political propaganda’ (Appadurai 2006:54). Such campaigns constitute ‘a remarkable feat of active ideological and political engineering. Even in themselves they could be seen as evidence of the effort required to build a successful national consensus in favour of the campaign against’ a minority such as the Ahmadis (Appadurai 2006:55). In Pakistan, this sustained effort against the Ahmadis has necessitated the active involvement of state institutions such as the Punjabi Auqaf Department⁵ (religious affairs), which funds public anti-Ahmadi media campaigns, including sponsoring billboards and patronizing organizations that distribute ‘pamphlets calling upon Muslims to kill Ahmadis everywhere indiscriminately’ (Hamdani 2012). It is also visible in the government offices displaying posters with slogans incorporating language Ahmadis consider offensive such as the term ‘Qadiani’ derived from the birthplace of Ghulam Ahmad in Qadian, India. Such slogans include ‘he who is a friend to Ahmadis is a traitor’ or ‘when a Muslim befriends a Qadiani, he causes anguish to the spirit of the Holy Prophet (PBUH)’ (Hamdani 2012). In Appadurai’s terms, it is the social uncertainty of the modern world coupled with the high level of ‘doctrinal certainty’ that comes from the education system itself that supports the hostility towards the Ahmadis and which focuses social, political and economic uncertainties on a single group who can then become the visible scapegoat and target of the majority population which takes on a predatory identity in the process (Appadurai 2006:91).

What follows is neither a history of the Ahmadis nor an account of Ahmadi theology: both are already available elsewhere (e.g. Friedman 1989; Lavan 1974). It is, rather, a set of episodes and fragments that engage with some aspects of history and belief as a way of situating the Ahmadis in ways that will, I hope, help frame the ethnographic studies of Ahmadi life in the diaspora that make up the subsequent chapters of this book.

Prophethood and communities of faith in the colony

In 1889, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad through his paternal grandmothers and from noble ancestors of Persian origin, founded the Jama‘at Ahmadiyya (Dard 2008).⁶ As a young man, Ghulam Ahmad had witnessed the end of the Mughal empire in India.⁷ Bhadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the British in 1857 and had been sent into exile the following year. Many Indian Muslims at the time experienced these events as disempowerment, and as both consequence and evidence of ‘Muslim decline’. As Sevea (2012:4) notes:

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … proved to be a ‘time of great ferment in the history of Muslim India’; one in which the perceived challenges to Islamic institutions, practices and traditions were more urgent and the responses more varied.

These responses included ‘extensive adoption of print technology’ and ‘the emergence of new Muslim educational institutions – both religious and secular’ but also ‘the bourgeoning of Muslim movements that competed in the public arena to provide the “true” Islamic perspective on a host of socio-political issues’. Although Ghulam Ahmad’s family were Muslim Punjabi landholders who claimed Mughal descent and supported the British – for which they were rewarded – it is impossible to see his discovery of his messianic calling and the founding of Ahmadiyya Islam as anything but a response to the cultural and political crisis experienced by Indian Muslims in the aftermath of the end of Mughal rule.

Seven years earlier, in 1882, Ghulam Ahmad had ‘announced that he had received a divine command that he was to be a mujaddid (renewer of the faith)’ (Jones 2008:116). ‘The formal foundations for the Ahmadiyya as a distinct religious community were laid in 1888, when Ghulam Ahmad published an ishtihar (literally, ‘advertisement’) declaring himself the renewer of the age’ (Sevea 2012:32). But it was on 12 January 1889, the day on which his son was born, that Ghulam Ahmad proclaimed the conditions under which he would grant initiation through the Sufi institution of bai‘at to his followers.⁸ In the following years he published texts in which he set out his claim to be both the promised messiah (masih mau’ud) and also the mahdi (Jones 2008:116).

While this book does not deal in any detail with the theological underpinnings of Ahmadiyya Islam, it would be impossible fully to understand the history and politics of Ahmadiyyat and the Ahmadis in the subcontinent and in diaspora without some knowledge of Ghulam Ahmad’s claims to prophe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on transliteration, translation and quotation
• List of abbreviations
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Sameness and difference: situating the Ahmadis
• 2 Ceremonial occasions: repetition and time
• 3 Enchantment and the ethic of brotherhood: dreams and the charismatic organization
• 4 Asylum and the Ahmadi diaspora
• 5 Home from home: mosque building and urban planning in a global city
• Postscript
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index