Source: bostonglobe.com

Males and females are separated for prayers and social gatherings at the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s mosque in Sharon. The minority Islamic group has worked to promote peace and has held blood drives in honor of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

It’s prayer time on a Sunday at the Baitun Nasir Mosque in Sharon. In the last row of the women’s prayer room, two little girls who look like sisters are getting fidgety, and the more active one is turning around, eyeing an archway at the back. It leads to an anteroom where women are setting out foil-covered platters of food for the social hour to follow.

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Mian Ghalib listens to a talk at the Baitun Nasir Mosque.

The scene may be familiar, yet this mosque is one of just 60 or so in the United States in the Ahmadi tradition, a branch of Islam controversial among Muslims and often completely unknown among non-Muslim Americans.

In Pakistan, where the largest number of Ahmadis live, the constitution defines them as non-Muslims. They are targets of deadly violence and their graves vandalized.

The divergence stems chiefly from the belief by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, one of two Ahmadi subgroups, that a man born in 1835 in India, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a prophet and messiah. This contradicts the fundamental view in the dominant branches of Islam that Muhammad was the last prophet of God.

“A lot of Muslims feel that we are beyond the pale of Islam,” said Amer Malik, president of

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Nasir Rana minds his daughter, Anaya, while listening to a talk at the Baitun Nasir Mosque in Sharon.

the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s Boston chapter, located in Sharon. But he said the basic tenets — including that there is one God, and that Muhammad was a prophet of God — are the same.

Ahmadis say the same prayers as other Muslims. They follow the Five Pillars of Islam: declaration of faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.

“It’s like the old days, when Catholics felt that Protestants were not Christians. It’s a bit like that,” Malik said.

The group separates men and women for prayers and social gatherings. A Globe photographer who visited the mosque recently was not allowed to photograph women, except in a controlled scene in which they wore their headscarves and turned away from the camera, so their faces were not visible.

The branch claims 15,000 US members. Harris Zafar, a spokesman for the national organization, said American membership has jumped 50 percent in the last five years due to conversion, migration, and population growth. That’s a small fraction of the 2.6 million Muslims in the United States, the number estimated by the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s …continue reading at bostonglobe.com