Ahmadiya: 'Muslims or Heretics?'

In Bangladesh, the government has banned religious books belonging to a small Islamic sect known as Ahmadiya. It's a small sect — maybe 150,000 people out of a country of 130 million — in a small country without any oil. So it would be easy, says Naeem Mohaiemen, for the United States to ignore the book banning as nothing very important.

But that would be a mistake, says Mohaiemen, a filmmaker and editor of a progressive Muslim Web site called Shobak.org. Mohaiemen, a native of Bangladesh who now lives in New York, is in Salt Lake City today to speak at a screening of his documentary "Muslims or Heretics?"

The Ahmadiya are more prevalent in Africa and Europe but in Bangladesh are "statistically insignificant," says Mohaiemen. Still, the campaign against them is an example of the clash between progressive Muslims and fundamentalists in countries that have not yet made the transition from secular to Islamic states.

"It is in these pendulum states that the Ahmadiya crisis matters so much," he says. "It is here that the Ahmadiya issue is being used to insert religion deeper and deeper into politics and the state."

The Ahmadiya have angered fundamentalist countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because the Ahmadiya have a liberal interpretation of Islam. They oppose the idea of an Islamic state, believing instead that Islam is not a political religion but a personal one in which the state should not be involved. They also oppose armed jihad and suicide bombing.

Of course there are other Muslim leaders, nations and peoples who also oppose armed jihad and the killing of innocent civilians, Mohaiemen notes. "But it's not easy for radical Islamists to go after those people — because what excuse will you use?"

With the Ahmadiyas, on the other hand, the excuse is this: They believe that their founder — Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, who began preaching in British India about 100 years ago — is a prophet. And according to the vast majority of Muslims, there is no prophet after Muhammad.

The first opposition to the Ahmadiyas surfaced in Pakistan during the 1950s, with anti-Ahmadiya riots that eventually forced the resignation of Foreign Minister Zafruhhal Kahn, who was an Ahmadiya. In 1974, the Pakistani Constitution was amended to declare Ahmadiyas non-Muslims. It's illegal for Ahmadiyas to pray, build mosques or put Islamic prayers on their gravestones. And all this was a prelude, Mohaiemen says, to the enactment of a blasphemy law and the institution of Shariah courts, in which the law is based on the Quran.

Last year, the anti-Ahmadiya campaign spread to Bangladesh, a country that was once part of Pakistan. In January, the Bangladeshi government banned Ahmadiya books.