Founded in 1889 in British India, Ahmadiyya is an Islamic sect that actually preaches everything that Islam as a whole pretends to stand for: love, peace, forgiveness, and the brotherhood of all humankind. It rejects terrorism, violent jihad, and the concept of “abrogation” whereby later, nastier passages of the Koran are considered to trump earlier, nicer bits.
That’s the good news about Ahmadiyya Muslims – or Ahmadis, for short. The bad news is that they make up only about 1% of the world’s Muslims. Almost all of the other 99% regard them as infidels. In India they’re officially categorized as Muslims and allowed to worship freely, but that’s an exception: in Pakistan, which has the largest Ahmadi population on earth, they’re considered non-Muslims, they’re not allowed to call themselves Muslims, and they’re banned from non-Ahmadi mosques. In Saudi Arabia, in the Palestinian territories, and in several other countries in the Islamic world, Ahmadis are brutally persecuted both by authorities and by their non-Ahmadi neighbors.
A wildly disproportionate number of the Muslims in North America and Europe who have organized anti-terrorism rallies have been Ahmadis. At these events, they routinely give speeches declaring fervently that terrorism is un-Islamic; that jihad, properly understood, means inner struggle and good works; and that Islam teaches sexual equality, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state. Again, Ahmadi Islam does teach all these things. But mainstream Islam doesn’t. Indeed, a big part of the reason why mainstream Islam abhors Ahmadi Islam is that the sect’s beliefs are utterly at odds with the tenets of Sunni and Shia Islam.
So, yes, hurrah for Ahmadi Muslims. If they were the 99% and Sunni and Shia Muslims were the 1%, we could stop worrying so much about Islam. But alas, that’s not the case. Hence, even though Ahmadi Muslims’ beliefs are admirable, it’s problematic when they step in front of crowds of Westerners and present their own version of Islam as if it were the Islam of the majority. Sure, one assumes that when they do this sort of thing, they see themselves as fighting against what they consider the misinterpretations of Islam that are spread by the 99%. But what they’re actually doing, whether they intend it or not, is whitewashing mainstream Islam.