The Exclusion of Ahmadis from Pakistani Muslimness: Iqbal, Maududi, and the Zia Regime

Abstract A genealogy of anti-Ahmadi narratives in Pakistan can be traced from the Zia regime (1977–88), through Maulana Maududi, and back to Muhammad Iqbal. The Zia regime criminalised and de facto excluded Ahmadis from the Muslim community through the 1984 Ordinance, rationalised in a pamphlet that plagiarised Maududi’s work. Before their criminalisation, Ahmadis were constitutionally excluded from the Pakistani Muslim community through the 1974 Second Amendment, which, like Iqbal, defined a Muslim according to belief in Khatam-e-Nabuwwat (the finality of prophethood). One argument to separate Ahmadis was thus theological, that they misinterpreted Khatam-e-Nabuwwat by believing that the founder of the community was a prophet. Other arguments were socioeconomic and political, with Iqbal and Maududi both perceiving Ahmadis as declaring themselves separate from Muslims, while benefitting from their association with the Muslim community. This will be contextualised within Iqbal’s desire to maintain the unity of the Muslim community in the face of socioeconomic challenges prior to Pakistan’s creation but also the dismantling of Muslim political power in both pre-Partition India and the wider world, an inherent concern of the anti-colonial Khilafat movement (1919–22), from which other prominent anti-Ahmadi figures emerged. Maududi’s and the Zia regime’s presentations of Ahmadis as un-Islamic and historically sympathetic to British colonialists functioned to assert that Ahmadis were anti-Pakistan, too.