Source: Dissertation Reviews, by Sadia Saeed.

A review of Politics of Exclusion: Muslim Nationalism, State Formation and Legal Representations of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan.

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) founded Ahmadiyya Islam in the Indian sub-continent in the second half of the nineteenth century and found himself embroiled in controversy for his claim of being a Messiah and the Mahdi (the Muslim religious leader who is meant to appear before the Day of Judgement in the Islamic worldview). This is one of the main reasons why members of the Ahmadi community have continuously found themselves on the receiving end of attempts to delegitimize them as Muslims. Such attempts have been spearheaded by the traditional ulema or religious scholars who see a contradiction between such assertions and their understanding of the Prophet Muhammad being the seal of the Prophets.

Sadia Saeed’s dissertation, Politics of Exclusion, focuses on the Ahmadi community in Pakistan and aims to understand why the Pakistani state’s relationship with this community has undergone the shift that it has since Pakistan’s creation in 1947. Saeed illustrates this shift by highlighting three political moments in Pakistan’s history. She refers to these moments as those of accommodation (1953), when the State did not give in to the demands of the anti-Ahmadi campaign and maintained that Ahmadis had full citizenship rights; exclusion (1974), when the community was declared a non-Muslim minority by a constitutional amendment; and criminalization (1984), when any Ahmadi attempt to identify themselves as Muslim was deemed a criminal act and made punishable by law.

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