The Ahmadiyya are a religious minority who suffer persecution in Pakistan and many other Muslim-majority countries. In 2023, for example, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported that at least thirty-four attacks had targeted Ahmadi religious sites. As a result, lawyers, academics, and policy makers have searched for answers as to why international human rights law has failed to protect the Ahmadiyya. In doing so, they have largely focused on the contentious contemporary debates about the relationship between Islam, secularism, and human rights. A more productive approach, however, might be to use a historical lens, which can illustrate that the Ahmadiyya are much more than victims.

The Ahmadiyya were founded in the British Punjab in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who claimed to be a Messiah, Mahdi, and Prophet. Ghulam Ahmad ordered his followers to convert the world to Islam, and as a result his missionaries created amongst the first Muslim institutions and communities in the West, most notably in England and the United States of America. Despite their success in globalising Islam, Ghulam Ahmad’s claim to prophecy has proved very controversial amongst Muslims, because of its supposed violation of the doctrine that Muhammad was the last Prophet. In 1974, the Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and the National Assembly amended the Constitution to declare the Ahmadiyya non-Muslim. In 1984, President Zia ul-Haq issued Ordinance XX, which amended the Pakistan Penal Code to criminalise the Ahmadiyya’s claim to be Muslim and their practice of Islam.

Ahmadis appealed Ordinance XX, arguing that it violated the religious freedom guaranteed in Article 20 of the Pakistani Constitution. However, in 1993, the Supreme Court upheld the Ordinance’s constitutionality. Ahmadis are frequently denied access to civil and political rights (for example, discriminatory voter regulations have led to their effective disenfranchisement) and are disproportionately targeted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws (under which the criminal offence of defiling the Prophet Muhammad is punishable by the death penalty). These prejudicial legal frameworks encourage persecution of Ahmadis from wider society; for instance, they are the targets of mob violence, which the police do little to prevent, and are discriminated against in educational and professional settings.

Governments, NGOs, and international organisations have drawn attention to the persecution of the Ahmadiyya, highlighting how this persecution violates international human rights law. Rights violated include freedom of religion, freedom of expression, the right to life, and cultural and social rights such as the right to work and education. In 2021, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, and the Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues highlighted the plight of the Ahmadiyya. Lawyers, anthropologists, and historians have also chronicled Ahmadi persecution in depth. A common theme is whether human rights are able to protect religious freedom in Muslim contexts like Pakistan. This is an old debate, which revolves around arguments about whether Islam can be ‘compatible’ with human rights. Such debates could benefit from looking to history, which demonstrates that the Ahmadiyya are not just victims to be saved by international law. From this perspective, it becomes clear that they played an important role in the creation of the human rights regime that now decries their persecution.

The most explicit example is the contribution of leading Ahmadi, Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, to the creation of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, regarding religious freedom. Zafrulla was the first Pakistani Foreign Minister, and became the President of the International Court of Justice in 1970. In the first of these positions, he intervened in the final debates on the drafting of the UDHR, declaring that the freedom to change religion was not only compatible with Islam but fundamental to it. This was a vital intervention, because it countered the opposition of other Muslim States, such as Saudi Arabia. In fact, Zafrulla’s intervention was merely the most recent in a long history of the Ahmadiyya campaigning for religious freedom in the language of human rights across the globe. He theorised this project in depth, and in fact eventually argued that human rights could only be realised through uniting the world under Islam, rather than through a system caught between the sovereignty of nation states and the justice of international law.

This forgotten history of human rights provides a different perspective to the growing literature detailing Christianity’s well-known influence on the human rights project, and on religious freedom in particular. These histories have been used to explain the struggles of non-Christian religions in international law; the struggles of Muslims at the European Court of Human Rights, for example, is well-documented. However, paying greater attention to the role and agency of Muslims in the development of international human rights law, rather than seeing them solely as victims, provides a very different perspective. Such an approach of course challenges arguments that Islam is necessarily ‘incompatible’ with human rights, instead underlining that both entities are contextually, or historically, constructed. And it also suggests that taking the thought of persecuted minorities seriously provides an important avenue for exploring the difficulties that international law faces in protecting minorities from discrimination.

Want to learn more?

• Suffering in Silence: The Persecution of the Ahmadiyas in Pakistan
• Inequality and Discrimination Faced by Religious Minorities in Pakistan
• Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan Declares the Custom of Swara as un-Islamic and unconstitutional
• Blasphemy Human Rights: The Intervention of the Supreme Court of Pakistan in the Manshamasih Case
• Blasphemy Laws and Human Rights in Pakistan
• Pakistan: A Paradoxical Divinity