Suffocation of the Faithful — front-cover of the parliamentary report
This report, the first of its kind, was commissioned against the backdrop of a shocking pattern of sustained persecution against Ahmadi Muslims including killings, assaults, attacks on places of worship, hate campaigns, deprivation of jobs and denial of education.
This is severest in Pakistan and what is unique about the persecution of this peace-loving community is that the persecution is state-sponsored, with laws passed explicitly targeting Ahmadi Muslims. I cannot think of any parallel in the modern world for such persecution where a religious community has been denied — by law — the right to self-identify as Muslims. Not only that, the law then prescribes that should an Ahmadi call himself a Muslim or practice Islam then that is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment (and even death under the blasphemy laws). These are the draconian anti-Ahmadi laws that Pakistan has had on its statute books for nearly half a century.
Such is the extent of persecution that it is no exaggeration to describe the life of an Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan as one that faces persecution from the cradle to the grave. At every step of their lives they remain ever at risk of arrest, attack or harassment. Ahmadis have been denied their fundamental right to vote, they cannot possess their religious texts and even after death, their graves are targeted and bodies exhumed. …
[In 2020] Pakistan’s State Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Mr Ali Muhammad Khan supported an anti-Ahmadiyya twitter campaign by calling for Ahmadis to be punished by death. This resulted in a tirade of abuse and hate speech against Ahmadi Muslims. Such proclamations feed a climate of hate and the most recent targets of this [were] Ramzan Bibi, a 55-year-old Ahmadi Muslim woman and Rohan Ahmed, an Imam of the community in Pakistan, both of whom have been arrested on false allegations of blasphemy. Over the past few years Ahmadi mosques have been demolished, homes and businesses set on fire, leaflets and hate speech [have] been rampant declaring Ahmadis ‘liable to be killed’ and Ahmadis have been subject to brutal target killings.
(Suffocation of the Faithful: The Persecution of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, 2020)
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