Reuters: Perhaps the text messages foreshadowed what was about to happen in Pakistan. One in June telling him his services as a London taxi driver would not be needed. A second in July: “u r qadiani and qadianis are not muslims. They r kaafirs”.

And then a phone call from an anguished relative back home. Police had come to their mosque, the pride of the local Ahmadi community, in the town of Kharian in Pakistan’s Punjab province and torn down its minarets.

“It was a very beautiful mosque,” recalled Munawar Ahmed Khurshid, the imam who laid the first stone when the mosque was built, and who like many Ahmadis has since moved to Britain after Pakistan’s laws turned increasingly hostile to the sect – often known by the derogatory term Qadiani in Pakistan and dismissed as kafir, or infidels. Begun in 1978 to replace the old mosque where Ahmadis and non-Ahmadis had once prayed together – “We were in such harmony; they prayed on one side and we on the other,” said Khurshid – it was a big Moghul-style, two-storey structure.

It had two large minarets and eight smaller minarets, and everyone in the community – labourers and professionals alike – had worked side-by-side to build it. Then on July 10, police destroyed the smaller minarets to enforce laws passed by Pakistan’s then military ruler Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in 1984 which forbid Ahmadis from doing anything associated with Islam – backing up with zeal a parliamentary decision from 1974 declaring them non-Muslims.

According to people from the town, the police used Christians – poor men who worked for municipal authorities cleaning the streets and the drains – to deface the Kalima, the fundamental tenet of Islamic faith inscribed in Arabic calligraphy outside the mosque.

And such is the intimacy between Pakistan and its 1.2 million-strong diaspora in Britain that not only did the Ahmadi community in London learn the details from their families before it was reported in the media, they have seen the echoes of the same persecution here.

Or more strangely, a foreshadowing.

Hence the texts to the taxi driver – whose name has been withheld for security reasons – who broke off from a conversation about events in Pakistan to bring out his phone to show the messages he received in London. Qadiani is an insult which deprives Ahmadis of a description associated with Islam. It is based on the name of the town in what is now Indian Punjab where the sect’s founder began the reformist movement in 19th century British India.

The term kafir, or infidel, has been most powerfully associated with the takfiri tradition of al Qaeda in deciding who should be accepted as Muslims, fuelling violence among Islam’s many sects in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Credit: Myra McDonald

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