Who are the Ahmadis, the Muslims the UN is calling on to protect?

Who are the Ahmadis, the Muslims the UN is calling on to protect?

Independent UN experts on Thursday, July 25, denounced the resurgence of discrimination and violence in Pakistan against the Ahmadi community, a branch of Islam not recognized in the country. They called for their protection.

In a statement, the nine experts mandated by the Human Rights Council highlight various incidents that have occurred in recent months, “including extrajudicial killings” of two Ahmadis on July 8 and the President of the Ahmadi Community of Bahwalpur on March 4.

They also note that an alarming number of attacks on Ahmadi places of worship and graveyards have been reported since the beginning of the year, aimed at “prevent or hinder their participation in their religious practices”Some of them resulted in serious injuries to worshipers.

Restore Islam

Ahmadiyya or Ahmadism was born at the end of the 19th century in India. Its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, born in Qadian, in Punjab, northeast of Amritsar, proclaimed that Allah had entrusted him with the task of restoring Islam. He proclaimed himself mujaddid (renovator) and muhaddith (capable of reviving tradition) of the Muslim religion. His followers saw in him the mahdi or messiah expected at the end of time.

While considering themselves Muslims, Ahmadis give a privileged place to Jesus and the saints. They develop a particular Christology, claiming that Jesus was taken down from the cross in a coma (and not dead) and could have continued his preaching by going as far as the east of the Euphrates.

A few years after the death of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the movement split into two, with a “Qadiani” branch, which venerated him as a prophet, and a so-called Lahore branch, which revered him as a renovator.

In 1947, after the independence and partition of India, many Ahmadis joined the newly created Pakistan, where they number several million today. In the second half of the 20th century, they spread to Algeria, Europe, Canada and the United States. There are about 1,500 in France.

Heresy

These beliefs in a prophet after Muhammad led orthodox Sunni Muslims to regard Ahmadism as heresy. In 1973, Ahmadism was declared a sect unrelated to Islam by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which banned its followers from making the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Pakistan followed suit and amended its constitution in 1974 to designate Ahmadis as non-Muslims. In 1984, a new law banned them from calling themselves Muslims, broadcasting the call to prayer, and calling their prayer rooms “mosques.”

Since then, at least 4,000 Ahmadis have faced criminal proceedings because of their faith, including several hundred for blasphemy, according to a count by the community. In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the charge of blasphemy is punishable by death, although it was never carried out in this particular case. But on May 28, 2010, attacks on two Ahmadis mosques in Lahore left about 80 people dead and 80 injured.

There are ten million Ahmadis elsewhere in the world. In Algeria, where there are some 2,000 followers, twenty-seven were sentenced in 2018 to suspended prison sentences of three to six months, notably for “offending Islam”.

Similar Posts