Dedicated to supernatural revelation and the divine governance of society, Pakistan's Ahmadi community has endured mob violence and penal sanctions for refusing to embrace the beliefs of the Sunni majority. They disagree with fundamentalist ideas of exclusiveness and consider themselves a reformed version of Islam. Although they have adopted Enlightenment ideas about the pursuit of scientific knowledge and produced a notable number of technicians, doctors, and scientists, women continue to live under a strict definition of purdah and the community remains conservative. The Ahmadis reveals a society strictly grounded in divinely prescribed patterns - including parental authority, close family ties, a disposition towards gender-specific roles, and separation of the sexes - but at odds with fanatical Muslim fundamentalism, whose wrath has spread beyond the Ahmadi minority to include the West.

This path-breaking work traces the history of the political exclusion of the Ahmadiyya religious minority in Pakistan by drawing on revealing new sources. This volume is the first-ever scholarly study of the declassified material of the court of inquiry that produced the Munir-Kiyani report of 1954, and the proceedings of the national assembly that declared the Ahmadis as non-Muslims through the second constitutional amendment in 1974. The book chronicles the details of anti-Ahmadi violence and the legal and administrative measures adopted against them, and also addresses wider issues of politics of Islam in postcolonial Muslim nation-states and their disputative engagements with the ideas of modernity and citizenship.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim community represents the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), a charismatic leader whose claims of spiritual authority brought him into conflict with most other Muslim leaders of the time. The controversial movement originated in rural India in the latter part of the 19th century and is best known for challenging current conceptions of Islamic orthodoxy. Despite missionary success and expansion throughout the world, particularly in Western Europe, North America, and parts of Africa, Ahmadis have effectively been banned from Pakistan. Adil Hussain Khan traces the origins of Ahmadi Islam from a small Sufi-style brotherhood to a major transnational organization, which many Muslims believe to be beyond the pale of Islam.

Ever since God Almighty has instituted the system of prophet-hood for the guidance of mankind, the opponents of these holy prophets, peace be on them, have always charged them with falsehood and untruth. They were called sorcerers and madmen and were described as disorderly and rebellious. Every prophet and God’s elect was treated in that manner. The same was the case with the Promised Messiah, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, peace be on him. when he put forth his claim of being the Reformer of the age and the Promised Mehdi, not only Muslim divines, but the leaders of other religions also, rose up against him and assailed him with false charges and insupportable objections. Muslim divines proclaimed that his teaching was opposed to Islam and the practice of the Holy Prophet, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, and showered false charges upon him.

How do you prove that you're Muslim? This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India's Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minority—people for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: What evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith? In Far from the Caliph's Gaze Nicholas H. A. Evans explores how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in Qadian in northern India. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya community's founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis' spiritual leader—the caliph—since partition, and the believers who live there now and act as its guardians must confront daily the reality of this separation even while attempting to make their Muslimness verifiable. By exploring the centrality of this separation to the ethics of everyday life in Qadian, Far from the Caliph's Gaze presents a new model for the academic study of religious doubt, one that is not premised on a concept of belief but instead captures the richness with which people might experience problematic relationships to truth.

Simon Ross Valentine has written the first scholarly evaluation of the teachings, beliefs, and lifestyle of the Ahmaddiya Jama'at, an Islamic reform group founded in nineteenth-century India that currently boasts millions of followers worldwide. To the great aggravation of other Muslims, the Ahmadis assert that prophets existed after Muhammad, a controversial belief that has led to fierce persecution, especially in South Asia, where the government has declared the Ahmadis to be non-Muslims. Valentine explores other major claims made by the Ahmadis, including their assertion that Jesus, instead of dying on the cross (as Christians believe) or ascending to heaven after the crucifixion (as mainstream Muslims teach), in fact escaped from the Romans and settled in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir and the alleged location of Christ's tomb. After an account of the life of the movement's founder, Ghulam Mirza Ahmad, Valentine discusses the history of the Ahmadis, their proselytization strategies, the role of mosques and madrasas, the position of women within the religion, and the Ahmadis' doctrine of a peaceful jihad.

Following on the work he began in Conscience and Coercion: Ahmadi Muslims and Orthodoxy in Pakistan, Antonio Gualtieri returned to Pakistan to continue his conversations with devotees of the Ahmadi community. He reveals how this traditional society deals with conflicts arising from contact with the non-Ahmadi and shows how the Ahmadi survive in a country that is generally hostile to them. Dedicated to supernatural revelation and the divine governance of society, Pakistan's Ahmadi community has endured mob violence and penal sanctions for refusing to embrace the beliefs of the Sunni majority. They disagree with fundamentalist ideas of exclusiveness and consider themselves a reformed version of Islam. Although they have adopted Enlightenment ideas about the pursuit of scientific knowledge and produced a notable number of technicians, doctors, and scientists, women continue to live under a strict definition of purdah and the community remains conservative. The Ahmadis reveals a society strictly grounded in divinely prescribed patterns - including parental authority, close family ties, a disposition towards gender-specific roles, and separation of the sexes - but at odds with fanatical Muslim fundamentalism, whose wrath has spread beyond the Ahmadi minority to include the West.