The suburbs of southwest London make a curious home for the head of a global caliphate under attack for its brand of Islam.
Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the fifth caliph of the persecuted Ahmadiyya Muslim sect lives in exile in Southfields, a mile or so from the All England Club in Wimbledon.
Two weeks ago an Ahmadi shopkeeper in Glasgow was stabbed by a fellow Muslim because he had “disrespected the Prophet Muhammad”.
In his first interview since the killing, Mr Ahmad has told The Times of the plight of his people, cast out from their native Pakistan.
“Almost 30 years back the caliphate was in Pakistan and at the time the government of Pakistan . . . had established that Ahmadis cannot profess, preach, practise, the way that other Muslims do. You cannot offer sermons, prayers, you cannot call your mosques as mosques, you cannot give Muslim names to your children.
“Ahmadis are being tortured . . . quite a number of Ahmadis have been murdered. Here we are not officially being persecuted, here we are free — there is freedom of religion.”
In their homeland, houses have been torched during anti-Ahmadiyya riots, Ahmadis were massacred in their places of worship and their graves have been desecrated. In one case a Pakistani Ahmadi man was jailed for eight years for selling a book.
“It pains me, it hurts me. I hear from Pakistan that one of the Ahmadiyyat was murdered recently, stabbed to death because he said he was an Ahmadi. He had his shop there and just in front of his shop he was killed — just as it was in Glasgow.”
The Ahmadis have been referred to as “the Mormons of Islam” owing to their belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, born in the late 19th century, was the returning messiah promised by the Bible and Koran. With an avuncular smile, the immaculately dressed caliph said: “He has come and revived the Sharia to give the true teachings of Islam.”
Their form of Islam is radically different from the beliefs of many Muslims and for this they are often labelled heretics, blasphemers and infidels. Ahmadis recognise Krishna and Buddha as messengers of Allah, and believe that Jesus survived crucifixion and travelled to Kashmir, India, where he died aged 120.
Repeating their creed “love for all, hatred for none”, the caliph adds: “We love peace, we love harmony. We create love in society — we say that as a Muslim you are duty-bound to love your country.” He is the head of a faith that he says is growing despite the adversity, and the Ahmadis believe they number 16 million worldwide — and about 20,000 of the 2.8 million Muslims in Britain. Their complex in south London includes a small television centre that broadcasts four channels around the globe.
“Every year 500,000 people are joining us. The majority of the Ahmadis are in African countries — Ghana, Nigeria and francophone African countries,” he says. “Quite a lot of people joining us are Christians, pagans. Muslims are more stubborn,” he laughs, but the opposition is more than obduracy.
Even in Britain, in 2010 leaflets were disseminated in Urdu calling for violence against Ahmadis. When an advertisement appeared in a Luton newspaper in 2014 celebrating the faith’s 125th year, there was such vitriol from the local Muslim community that Luton on Sunday issued a controversial apology “completely disassociating” itself from the content of the advert.
An organisation called Khatme Nubuwwat, whose stated mission is to oppose what it calls the “heretic beliefs” of the Ahmadis, even followed them to the UK and set up offices in south London.
“We are being victimised because of our religion, not by the local people but by the Asian fundamentalists,” the caliph says. “It is not only Khatme Nubuwwat.”
Between the rows of terraced Victorian houses in Southfields is a small, green-domed mosque built in 1923 where the caliph leads prayers five times a day. The mosque, which has a capacity of about 150, has since been dwarfed by the their enormous Baitul Futuh Mosque in Morden — the biggest mosque in Europe. The Baitul Futuh was set alight in an arson attack last year. Two teenagers were arrested but no charges have been brought.
Their mosques are all fitted with metal detectors and have security guards at the doors, but the caliph wants more work to be done to develop tolerance elsewhere and combat extremism.
“We should monitor madrassas and mosques and those systems which are being used to radicalise them [young people]. If they are given a proper teaching of Islam, they can never be radicalised,” he says.
“In schools from the very beginning they should be taking a pledge of loyalty to their country.”
Asked about the leader of Isis, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the only other man alive said to lead a caliphate, he says: “We have seen Baghdadi only once; nobody knows if he is alive or not. The so-called Islamic State’s strongholds have been recaptured . . . where is the caliphate?”
Whatever the outrage his title and beliefs might prompt, the last caliph on Earth might be the caliph of suburbia.
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