Persecution of Ahmadi Muslims

Ahmadi Muslims, followers of the movement founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889, have faced sustained religious persecution across much of the Muslim-majority world because mainstream Muslim authorities consider the Ahmadiyya belief in Ghulam Ahmad as a promised Messiah and Mahdi to place the movement outside Islam. Pakistan has enacted the most extensive legal persecution, with the Second Amendment to its constitution in 1974 formally declaring Ahmadis non-Muslim, and subsequent ordinances criminalizing Ahmadis who describe themselves as Muslim, call their places of worship mosques, or use Islamic terminology in worship. This legal framework has been accompanied by recurring mob and militant violence against Ahmadi communities, most severely in the coordinated 2010 attacks on two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore during Friday prayers, in which gunmen and suicide bombers killed dozens of worshippers in an assault claimed by a Pakistani Taliban faction. The Lahore massacre is documented as the deadliest single attack in the broader pattern of anti-Ahmadi persecution that Pakistan's legal status for the group has enabled and, according to human rights monitors, encouraged.