The Othering of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Abstract

The Ahmadiyya movement is one of the most controversial movements within the South Asian Islam from the late 19th and the 20th century. The movement from the beginning was instrumental in reinvigorating the debate on the Islamic orthodoxy and interpretation and re-interpretation of the Islamic texts among Muslims. These controversies and debates over the period of time have entered into the public consciousness particularly among Muslims of South Asia, which has enabled it to become an accepted feature of the contemporary South Asian Politics. As the movement became more public, the distinct identity of Ahmadi took shape and a notion of Ahmadiyyat as distinct expression of Islam became increasingly politicised. Similarly, the emergence of this Ahmadi identity was influenced by modern South Asian politics as much as South Asian Islam was influenced by the modernists. This influence has widened the dichotomy between Ahmadi Islam and the orthodox Islam. The current study focuses on how South Asian Islam’s narratives grew and developed to build and declare Ahmadis as a non-Muslim minority. It also demonstrates how these narratives were exploited over time by both Muslim groups and famous Muslims to malign and portray the Ahmadiyya community as ‘other’ in the eyes of Muslim and state structures. The study focuses primarily on the narratives of the 20th-century Muslim intellectuals such as Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Abul A’la Maududi, and other groups such as Majlis-i-Ahrar, as well as their role in building and constructing narratives that declared Ahmadis as ‘other’ while also changing their identity and status as Muslims.