MAJURO, The Republic of the Marshall Islands — Tucked onto a quiet side street in central Majuro, the white two-story building with baby blue trim hardly stands out other than two skinny rocket-shaped minarets rising skyward. Like an oversized house, the building presses up against a fence topped with barbed wire under which a sign reads “Love for all — hatred for none.”

Welcome to Baet-Ul-Ahad, the only mosque in the Marshall Islands. Mecca may be more than 8,000 miles away, but the flowing Arabic script over the front door announces this as a Muslim house of worship in the remote atoll nation.

Arriving shortly before Friday’s midday prayers, I’m met by the mosque’s senior imam, a bespectacled man in his early 30s with a neatly trimmed whisper of a beard. Matiullah Joyia invites me into his office where he introduces the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community of the Marshall Islands.

When Joyia arrived in 2012, there were scarcely a dozen Muslims in the entire nation. He says the mosque’s construction was met with fear and suspicion and remembers opening day when an exterior sign with a sacred verse was pelted with eggs. Empty beer cans were used to defile the gate.

“It was a message to us that ‘you’re not welcome.’ It was my very first day,” Joyia recalled.

Four and a half years later the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has gained a foothold as a tiny minority in a nation where United Church of Christ missionaries founded the Marshall Islands’ first Christian church in 1857. Today, Majuro has more than 30 churches serving UCC Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, the Assembly of God — in all at least a dozen Christian denominations — as well as a Baha’i community.

Within Islam, Ahmadiyya is a relatively new sect founded in 1889 in what is today India’s Punjab state by a man named Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Ahmadis recognize him as a messiah, sent as a metaphorical second coming of Jesus to “end religious wars, condemn bloodshed and reinstitute morality, justice and peace.”

Joyia says the Ahmadiyya Community stresses the importance of peaceful coexistence and that there is no justification for violence in the name of religion. The only acceptable form of jihad or “struggle,” Ahmad taught, was a metaphorical battle fought with a pen. The greater jihad, he said, was to fight negativity within oneself.

Ahmadis, however, face a history of discrimination and persecution by their fellow Muslims, particularly in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia. In a 1974 amendment to Pakistan’s constitution, Ahmadis were declared non-Muslims and since the 1980s they’ve been subject to penalties and worse, simply for presenting themselves as Muslims in appearance or deed.

Ahmadis go out of their way not to retaliate or strike back, Joyia said, lamenting, “We believe in Prophet Mohammed as much as they do.”

Accused of heresy, tens of millions of Ahmadis have migrated around the world, with the largest communities in Europe, North America and West Africa. Today, the Ahmadiyya Community’s international headquarters are in London.

‘Love For All — Hatred For None’

Joyia explains that Baet-Ul-Ahad serves about 120 Marshallese Muslims and visiting Muslims such as the Indonesian fisherman who… read more at the source mentioned above.