Aljazeera: Rabwah, Pakistan – Seeing her lying in her hospital bed, it’s difficult to tell what Mubashara Jarra has been through. Outwardly, she appears fine. No intravenous tubes snaking into her body, and no bandages covering up her wounds.

“I’m feeling much better,” she says, in a low voice.

It is, perhaps, only her vacant eyes that betray her ordeal. Jarra, 32, was trapped in a room, along with many of her family members, in her home in the Pakistani city of Gujranwala, as an angry mob burned down her neighbourhood on July 27. She saw her nieces – Hira Tabussum, 7, and seven-month-old Kainat – and mother, Bushra Bibi, 55, die of smoke inhalation, as she, her brother and his children struggled to stay alive.

Jarra barely survived, but her unborn child – she was seven-months pregnant – was stillborn at the hospital where she received treatment following the attack.

Their crime? Being Ahmadi in Pakistan.

‘Institutionalised persecution’

Ahmadi, or Ahmadiyya, are a minority sect who identify themselves as Muslims and follow the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran. They believe that the founder of their faith, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who was born in the Punjab town of Qadian in 1835, was a messiah and prophet.

There are estimated to be between 600,000 and 700,000 Ahmadis in Pakistan, with worldwide numbers of several million more. Most reside in South Asia, but there are large diaspora communities in Europe, and there are also indigenous Ahmadi communities in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Since 1974, Ahmadis have been declared “non-Muslim” under Pakistani law, after a constitutional amendment was passed under the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

That amendment allowed Islamist military ruler Zia-ul-Haq, who succeeded Bhutto, to further restrict Ahmadis’ freedom to practise their religion inPakistan through a 1984 ordinance that outlaws “posing as Muslims”.

The law imposes three-year jail terms on Ahmadis “who directly or indirectly, poses himself as a Muslim, or calls, or refers to, his faith as Islam, or preaches or propagates his faith, or invites others to accept his faith, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations, or in any manner whatsoever outrages the religious feelings of Muslims”.

It also makes it illegal for Ahmadis to refer to their places of worship as “mosques”, or their calls to prayer as “azaan”, in addition to other restrictions.

The 1984 law opened the door for an increase in attacks on the community by mobs and anti-Ahmadi groups. Since 1984, 245 Ahmadis have been killed in such attacks, while another 205 have been assaulted, according to the community’s data on such attacks.

So far in 2014 alone, 13 Ahmadis have been killed for practising their faith – most in targeted attacks on individuals – and another 12 have been assaulted.

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