The Ahmadis: A Peaceful Caliphate?
“Love for all, hatred for none”? Think again, as Ahmadi doctrine contains questionable aspects.
“Islam is going to progress and triumph in the world and the banner of the Holy Prophet shall be raised all over the world,” stated in a February 10, 2006, sermon Hadrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the currently reigning Ahmadiyya “caliph.” As previously noted, this small, cultish Muslim sect enjoys disproportionate influence among world leaders with Ahmadi claims of Islamic enlightenment, yet such statements about ultimate Ahmadi goals are more disturbing.
Ahmad rejoiced that Islamic Sharia law “can solve problems of all time and era,” but other observers, such as the Social Democratic German academic Johannes Kandel, are far more critical. In a 2006 study of the Ahmadis for Germany’s main Lutheran church, he noted that the Ahmadis have a “pre-democratic, absolutist state understanding.” Thus the “Ahmadiyyas represent in view of human rights and democracy positions, which, measured against critical inner-Muslim discourses on these questions, are ultraorthodox, indeed fundamentalist.”
Pastor Andreas Volkmar of the Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church (Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche) and the late (d. 2010) German scholar of Islam Hiltrud Schröter reached similar conclusions. In a 2017 study, Volkmar observed that the Ahmadis’ “vision is the implementation of the rule of Islam—worldwide—under the leadership of one of their future caliphs.” Schröter, author of a 2002 book on the Ahmadis, concurred that the Ahmadi community “perfectly sets itself in scene as a democratic Islam and veils its true goals: victory of Ahmadiyya Islam over all other religions.”
Volkmar noted that the Ahmadi community online “attempts, however, to incite the impression that the caliph—similar to the pope—is only a spiritual head,” but “this stands in contradiction to its own statements.” Both he and Schröter have quoted the statement by the fourth Ahmadi caliph, Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, during a February 24, 1990 address in London’s Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre for the Ahmadis’ centenary. He said that Sharia standards “bear essential guidelines for legislation and no democratically elected government can interfere with the express Will of God.”
Schröter additionally cited the leading Ahmadi ideologue Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, independent Pakistan’s first foreign minister and later president of the International Court in The Hague. He had praised as “ideal the state, in which the head of state exercises authority in the worldly as well as the spiritual realm.” Along with the then-Ahmadi caliph, Hazrat Mirza Bashiruddin Mahmud Ahmad, he also helped make Pakistan a leader in opposing the young state of Israel’s existence. Ironically, Israeli Ahmadistoday enjoy religious freedom and security unknown in Muslim-majority countries.
Ahmadi embrace of traditional Muslim opposition to Israel indicates how the prophesised Ahmadi caliphate also entails non-Muslim submission, as Schröter described Ahmadi doctrine as “full of hatred against the West and Christianity.” In this vein, Ahmadi writing has “camouflaged anti-Jewish and anti-American propaganda and contributes in this manner to the creation and spread of hatred,” contrary to the Ahmadi motto, “love for all, hatred for none.” “Like all Islamists, the leaders of the Ahmadiyya perceive themselves to be morally and spiritually superior to Western society and believe that they must and are able, with Allah’s help, to overcome it,” she added.
Accordingly, Schröter wrote that the Ahmadi community “leads a jihad against Christianity, and the world marked by Christianity, with propaganda” and “totally extraordinary financial power.” Caliph Masroor Ahmad himself correspondingly praised in a February 17, 2006, sermon the Ahmadis’ namesake, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded the Ahmadi community in 1889 in India. This “Promised Messiah has challenged the Christians in this age. It was him alone who stopped Christianity in its tracks as it was spreading fast. At that time, in India, hundreds of thousands of Muslims were turning to Christianity.” Again in modern times, the “Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has stopped the onslaught of Christianity in Africa.”
Others, such as Sabatina James, a Pakistani-Austrian Muslim convert to the Catholic Church, have alsoconfirmed anti-Christian and anti-Semitic Ahmadi statements. Kandel observed that the “writings of their ‘promised prophet’ Mirza Ghulam Ahmad contain clearly pejorative statements in reference to Christianity and Judaism.” Volkmar likewise judged that Ahmadi “argumentation with Christianity and Judaism is almost thoroughly apologetic and offers no beginnings of a serious theological dialogue.”
Ahmadi practice “distinguishes itself hardly from other Muslim ‘refutations’ of ‘falsifications’ of the ‘true belief,’ i.e. Islam,” Volkmar stated. “While the Bible can be thoroughly dissected by the movement ‘historically-critically,’ the Quran remains untouchable and supposedly it accords completely with the findings of natural science.” “Contrary to all protestations, the Ahmadiyya are not really interested in a dialogue with other religions.”
Schröter agreed that in Ahmadi “interreligious dialogue…basically no dialogue takes place, but rather jihad. This pseudo-dialogue involves a form of taqiyya, the disguise of Islamists in enemy surroundings.” She in particularly noted how this Ahmadi literature “jihad” involved “text manipulations and distortions” of the Bible. “Whoever thinks up such things wants to produce rejection and hatred of Jews and Christians, wants to make them despised, dishonor them, and humiliate them.”
Schröter summarized that Ahmadis wage jihad
not with force of arms, but with the force of words, through suggestion and evocation of feelings of superiority. Language is used propagandistically, even the Quran is instrumentalized. The Ahmadiyyas do not shrink before the holy books, wherever the implementation of their global power interests is concerned.
Ahmadis only provoke more suspicions with their strange doctrine that Jesus “was taken down from the cross in a state of unconsciousness” and traveled to Kashmir. There he supposedly “preached to the Lost Tribes of Israel” and, as Kandal skeptically noted, died at the age of 120 and is now buried near Srinagar, a “long scholarly refuted claim,” as Schröter pointed out. Volkmar scoffed that these “claims about Jesus death in Kashmir and the supposed falsifications of the Christian faith belong in the realm of phantasy.”
In sum, Ahmadi visions of a caliphate vanquishing Judeo-Christian and other beliefs disabused of any illusions Volkmar, who found that the “Ahmadiyya presents no real reform movement” in Islam. This community rather “is a Sunni-formed Islamic splinter group with syncretic traits” in which “at the end of all religious and political developments the introduction of sharia is also here striven for.” Although Ahmadi doctrine contained a “clear rejection of the application of physical force,” Schröter dismissed Ahmadi belief as an “increased form of the Islamic rule and obedience religion.”
James referenced the well-known hadith from Islam’s prophet Muhammad that “war is deceit” and the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya to warn against the Ahmadis. “With the Ahmadiyya as well, nothing concerning jihad’s goal ceases. The community indeed rejects militant jihad, but in compensation they implement verbal jihad massively and very skillfully.” Therefore, the “Ahmadiyya Islam is no reformed Islam, but rather only another face of the political, totalitarian, and inhumane radical Islam, that Islam, which we already always knew, filled with superiority feelings and condescending dissenters.” How the beliefs of this claimed incipient caliphate manifest themselves in the present day will be the subject of future articles in this series.
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