Zia tells us to embrace Qadianis

It looks like Ziauddin Sardar has finally overstepped the mark … in his latest column in the New Statesman, he insists that we Muslims "respect differences among ourselves – particularly when they appear to be unpalatable", in this case the differences between us and the Qadiani (or Ahmadi, as they call themselves) sect. This is not the first time I've heard him advance these kinds of viewpoints; addressing an audience in a London Borders bookstore next to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, he mentioned imams who insist that Qadianis are not Muslim, and said that they were now also claiming the same about Ismailis, the sect to which Alibhai-Brown belongs. (In fact, Ismailis, like other extreme Shi'a groups, have always been regarded as outside the fold of Islam.) Article here – the site has a "one free article per day" policy.

Sardar notes that, in a meeting he witnessed in Alton, Hampshire, "men and women sat separately and listened to religious scholars giving sermons on the Koran", making them indistinguishable from normal Muslims to "most observers". Members of the sect are "on the whole, pretty conformist, believing that the Koran is divine and that Muhammad was a prophet, and who fast, pray, give generously in charity and do all the other things that Muslims are supposed to do". The problem with this is that it is beliefs, not actions, which make someone a Muslim. By this token, the Hindus who act as Muslims in films like East is East, performing Islamic acts of worship, are also Muslims, but this is not our definition of a Muslim. Our definition of a Muslim is one who affirms, and believes, the testimony of faith and what comes from it, and it is the last four words on which the Qadianis are judged to be outside Islam. This includes believing that the Prophet Muhammad, sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam, was the last prophet as he told us he was, and that if someone claims to be a prophet, or something amounting to a prophet, that if he is not insane then he is an impostor, and anyone who believes him (or her) is outside Islam.

Zia alleges that the less important of two departures of Qadianism from Islam is its rejection of violence in all its forms, including defensive jihad:

Generally, this would not have been a cause for concern for the orthodox, except that the Ahmadiyya movement first emerged in 1889, barely 20 years after the "Indian Mutiny". At that time, jihad against the Raj was the norm, so many Indian Muslims saw the sudden arrival of the Ahmadiyya sect, loudly denouncing jihad, as a British imperialist conspiracy. The conspiracy theories have stuck.

Actually, if such an idea had appeared at any time in the history of Islam, it would have been denounced as kufr or unbelief. To renounce jihad is simply to renounce the practice of the Prophet, sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam, and every generation of Muslims since. To renounce the idea of using force to "save a beleaguered community" is absurdity of the highest order: if the first generation had not taken up arms to fight the pagans at Badr, the community may have been wiped out altogether. It makes sense if you are the leader of a tiny sect which expects to prosper under the protection of non-Muslims, as in the UK or Israel. It doesn't make sense to bite the hand that feeds you, but if you intend to survive as an independent unit, you need to have people ready and willing to fight.

The most important difference concerns what Ghulam Ahmad claimed to be. The following is an extract from an essay on their website, A Life Sketch of the Promised Messiah:

Prophets achieve a closeness to God and a high spiritual station, but it is through their relationship with humanity that they are recognised. Indeed it is their example that leads others to God. This month while we celebrate the knowledge and wisdom of his lecture delivered at the Great Conference of Religions we should not forget the smaller, simpler details of Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's everyday living–incidents that may appear small things at first glance but nevertheless reflect the depths to which his character was immersed in the love of the Holy Qur'an and of his master, the Holy Prophet (saw) of Islam.

So, the implication that Ghulam Ahmad was a prophet is clearly made. Here is another, from the same article:

From an early age he received revelation from God, as well as visions and true dreams. It was in a state of relative seclusion and anonymity that in 1868/69 he received the revelation,

Thy God is well pleased with what thou hast done. He will bless thee greatly, so much so that Kings shall seek blessing from your garments.

Note: Muslims believe in visions and true dreams. This is not the same as revelation, which is peculiar to prophets. So they believe in, at the very least, Ghulam Ahmad as something amounting to a prophet.

Let us imagine for a moment that the sect do not actually regard him as a prophet. They call him the "Promised Messiah and Mahdi", despite the fact that the only Messiah is Jesus, alaihi as-salaam. The Mahdi is promised, by the (real) Prophet, sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam, to be recognised in the Hijaz (which Ghulam Ahmad never visited) and fight the Dajjal (antichrist), an individual of Jewish ethnicity (not western civilisation, as some of them claim). Given that Ghulam Ahmad rejected even defensive jihad, one wonders how they will do this and maintain their religion. When the Messiah, alaihi as-salaam, returns, it is foretold that he will do so in the Middle East and not India. Furthermore, decades after their "Messiah-Mahdi" died, we have yet to see the appearance of the Sufiani tyrant, the antichrist, the return of the Gog and Magog tribes, the Europeans appearing to us (in battle) with their scores of flags, or anything else we are told of the era of Mahdi and Messiah (alaihi as-salaam). So they are a false cult based on a religious fraud, following a bogus Messiah who does not fit the criteria of the real one.

Zia's other claims for them are simply irrelevances. One of them is that they have "the largest mosque in western Europe", the Baitul Futuh in Morden, Surrey, which is a building they did not build but rather bought. Neither did they build "Britain's first purpose-built mosque, which opened in 1889"; rather, they controlled it for a period. It was built with money donated by an aristocratic woman from Bhopal and is presently run by Sunnis. And furthermore:

Theirs is, without doubt, the most educated, organised and disciplined of all Muslim communities in Britain. They work, worship and act as a unit – which is why almost all of them attended their annual convention last month.

Which is because they are a small group, and as I wrote when addressing this topic in an earlier essay, it is easier to keep a small group united than a big one, and if you have a small group then it is relatively easy to hire a large venue to fit the whole crowd in. You can't do this with the Muslims in London, simply because there are so many of us. We have dozens of small mosques, each one built according to the needs or (perhaps more commonly) the resources of the local community, and contrary to popular opinion, we do not have access to a bottomless pit of oil money. We also do not have a supreme leader; minor differences of opinion are held as a mercy and not as a problem.

Reading the literature on their website, any Muslim is struck by the alien doctrines on display and anyone would notice their false pretensions. For example, in this PDF pamphlet, they start off by saying that "Islam believes in all the prophets and religious teachers appointed by God, including Muhammad, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Confucius and Zarathushtra (peace be upon them all)". In fact, Islam only explicitly accepts the prophets of the Israelites and their antecedents as well as Isma'il and Muhammad (sall' Allahu 'alaihim wa sallam) as prophets; we are told that every nation was sent messengers, but not told who they were. So the baseless innovations start from the first column of the first full page of their pamphlet! In the section on page 3 headed "Ahmadiyyat – The True Islam", we read:

Over a hundred years ago, an amazing event took place in an obscure and tiny hamlet (Qadian), in the province of the Punjab, India. It was an event that was destined to change the course of history.

In the sense that any event "changes the course of history" in its tiny way, this could be said to be true, but the fact remains that to date Ghulam Ahmad's influence has been negligible; his legacy is a small sect and a few foundations around the world. Apart from this fact, Muslims' energy has been expended in refuting their false claims and deceptions rather than getting on with other good works, much as the Sahaba were occupied in fighting the likes of Musaylima when they could have been fighting the Romans or Persians, who were a threat to the Muslim state.

The fact remains that Muslims do not judge the Qadianis as unbelievers by their desires but by the criteria which have always existed in our religion, which were made crystal clear by the reaction of the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) to Musaylima and other impostors of that period, many of them motivated by tribal rather than religious concerns. The reaction to Ahmadiyyat in any other generation would have been to denounce them and fight them; they were not fought only because they emerged under a friendly non-Muslim colonial régime and were too well-established, with a whole generation born into the sect, by the time the first attempt was made to set Pakistan on an Islamic course. As it happens, the sect has been a thorn in the side of Muslims since its inception, being among other things an excuse for outsiders to call us bigoted and uncivilised, although as these articles ([1], [2], [3]) suggest, their persecution is exaggerated and their position has become stronger under General Musharraf's leadership. Zia is already well-known for presenting the position of a tiny minority of academics in issues of fiqh as universally-accepted facts; here, he is denouncing the Muslim community in a non-Muslim white liberal publication at a time of weakness for the Muslims for rejecting a fraud in the name of Islam, thus adding the onus of treachery to the already serious matter of the falsehood he advances.