Early this year, on April 18, Laeeq Ahmed Cheema, a 46-year-old Ahmadi, went to an Ahmadiyya mosque in Karachi – the kind of place Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadi laws make dangerous even to name as a mosque. He did not return home. Outside the worship site, a mob had gathered and Cheema was beaten to death. According to the Associated Press, the Ahmadi community blamed the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a hardline Islamist religio-political party known for mobilizing around blasphemy and anti-Ahmadi campaigns.
Less than a week later, on April 24, Muhammad Asif, a 19-year-old Ahmadi youth from Bhullair in Kasur district, was shot dead; another young man, Ihsan Ahmad, was critically injured.
The International Human Rights Committee, a London-based religious freedom NGO, allowed The Diplomat to preview its upcoming report chronicling the persecution of Ahmadis from June 2024 to December 2025. That report attributes the attack on Asif to a reported TLP affiliate and says no arrests were made.
In May, Tahir Mahmood, a 71-year-old Ahmadi, was arrested after attending Friday prayers. According to the same report, he was beaten and tortured in police custody, denied bail, subjected to weeks of abuse, and died as a result. On May 16, Dr. Sheikh Mahmood, a 58-year-old Ahmadi gastroenterologist in Sargodha, was shot dead inside his hospital, reportedly after prior threats.
All of these victims, despite being in different daily businesses in their community – a businessman, a student, an elderly worshipper, a doctor – were all targeted for one reason: they were Ahmadi.
Ahmadis identify themselves as Muslim. They pray, read the Quran, fast, celebrate Eid, and understand themselves as part of Islam. But the Pakistani state does not accept that self-identification. Pakistan’s Constitution lacks space for a true freedom of religion and belief. According to Article 260(3) of Pakistan’s Constitution, “Muslim” is defined through belief in the “absolute and unqualified finality” of the prophethood of Muhammad. The constitution then defines “non-Muslim” to include “a person of the Quadiani Group or the Lahori Group who call themselves ‘Ahmadis’ or by any other name,” alongside Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis, and Bahais.
The delisting of Ahmadis from Muslim community by Pakistani legal structure became even harsher in 1984, when Ordinance XX inserted Sections 298-B and 298-C into the Pakistan Penal Code. Section 298-B criminalizes Ahmadis for using certain Islamic terms and for calling their place of worship a “Masjid,” the Arabic term for a mosque. It also criminalizes Ahmadis for referring to their call to prayer as “Azan.” Section 298-C criminalizes an Ahmadi who “poses” as Muslim, calls or refers to their faith as Islam, preaches or propagates it, or invites others to accept it. Based on the penal code, punishment can reach three years in prison and a fine.
This intentional listing of Ahmadi Muslims in the legal order among non-Muslim faiths, in a deeply Muslim and conservative country, has made discrimination against Ahmadis not only a matter of social hostility or extremist violence, but something placed at the heart of the Pakistan state itself.
In such circumstances, whenever members of the Ahmadiyya community try to establish mosques as spaces for prayer, read the Quran, or practice Islam as other Muslims do, it triggers certain groups. Because the constitution classifies Ahmadis as non-Muslims, and the penal code permits their practice of Islam to be labeled as blasphemy, it has created the conditions in which mobs and religious clerics can easily threaten and incite violence against the community. When state protection is required, the police often simply restrict Ahmadis further. Courts can punish members of the community for alleged blasphemy – as seen in the Mubarak Sani case, in which Sani was sentenced to life imprisonment in December 2025 for teaching and memorizing the Holy Quran. And the state claims that it is only maintaining public order, all because its own constitutional and legal framework permits this discrimination.
Therefore, for the Ahmadiyya community, persecution is a part of their daily life, no matter if it is on Friday prayers, Eid prayers, burials, voting, identity documents, religious language, and even the right to call oneself Muslim.
Farooq Aftab, an Ahmadi academic from the Secretariat of the International Human Rights Committee said, “The legal discrimination is not subtle – it is textual and state-sponsored.” Article 260(3) “constitutionally defines Ahmadis as non-Muslims, while Sections 298-B and 298-C criminalize core elements of Ahmadi religious expression,” Aftab continued.
According to Aftab, that legal structure gives violence against Ahmadis a ready-made language of accusation. A mob attacking an Ahmadi mosque can present itself not as lawless, but as enforcing religious boundaries the state itself has drawn. A cleric demanding the sealing of an Ahmadi mosque can frame discrimination as law enforcement. A police officer can restrict worship and claim he is preventing unrest. This is how law becomes permission for persecution of a minority.
When asked whether extremist-led mob violence in Pakistan often leads not to protection for Ahmadis, but to further restrictions imposed by the government, he said, “Yes, and the distinctive feature is that the ‘middle step’ is often the state.”
Aftab continued, “Extremist actors pressure authorities, authorities respond by restricting Ahmadi worship, and then accountability for attackers is weak while Ahmadis face FIRs/arrests.”
This is what makes the persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan different from isolated mob violence. The mob is only one part of the system. The other part is the state’s willingness to convert extremist pressure into administrative action.
Amnesty International documented this around Eid-ul-Adha in June 2025, reporting that authorities across Pakistan prevented Ahmadis from celebrating the Eid festival, including forcing individuals to sign affidavits to refrain from Eid prayers and ritual. The report noted that after incidents of harassment of Ahmadis by violent mobs after Friday prayers on a near-weekly basis during Ramadan, in Sindh and Punjab provinces, instead of protecting the community authorities detained at least 63 Ahmadis for offering prayers. Eventually the country banned Ahmadis from celebrating Eid, which according to the International Human Rights Committee, “marked a dangerous new depth in state-backed persecution.”
The cruelty extends beyond the living. Ahmadi graves have repeatedly been desecrated because they carry Islamic inscriptions. In some cases, communities have reportedly faced pressure to remove religious symbols from graves or worship sites.
Aftab argued that police and local administrations are not simply failing to protect Ahmadis; they are often part of the restriction itself.
“Both,” he said, when asked whether authorities are failing to protect Ahmadis or actively participating in persecution.
“Police and local administration are repeatedly described as not intervening when mobs attack, and actively enforcing restrictions that criminalize or suppress routine Ahmadi religious life.”
This creates what Aftab called “a low-risk environment for perpetrators and a high-risk environment for victims, who can be arrested for worship.”
The discrimination is also political and reaches to the point that it abolishes equal citizens rights for Ahmadis. According to Human Rights Watch, Pakistan’s electoral system effectively excludes Ahmadis from equal participation in elections. To register as voters, Ahmadis must either renounce their faith or accept placement on a separate electoral list that categorizes them as non-Muslims. In 2002, Pakistan abolished an electoral system in which Muslims and non-Muslims registered and voted in separate categories but created a separate category for Ahmadis. Pakistan’s most recent elections law, Elections Act 2017, retained those provisions regarding the status of the Ahmadis. Under this law, if a voter’s Muslim identity is challenged, the Election Commission can require them to declare that they are not Ahmadi; refusal places them on the non-Muslim voter list. Rather than deny their faith, many Ahmadis effectively remain excluded from voting altogether.
Yet despite this systematic exclusion of Ahmadis, Pakistan has rarely faced the kind of sustained international pressure such state-sponsored discrimination should invite. There has not been any real pressure on Pakistan to change the systematic discrimination Ahmadis face, driven by the country’s constitution, the penal code, electoral segregation, police enforcement, and judicial punishment, which is too often treated as a domestic sensitivity rather than a system of religious repression.
According to Aftab, “International critique often focuses on violence, but not enough on the citizenship architecture that makes violence predictable.”
He argued that this is where the international response has failed. In his view, Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadi framework is well-documented, but rarely converted into real diplomatic costs.
The consequence of that silence has been that it tells Pakistan’s establishment that it can maintain discriminatory laws while still presenting itself internationally as a constitutional democracy.
Pakistan should not be allowed to hide behind the language of public order while its own laws manufacture disorder for the religious communities inside the country. The Ahmadi community issue is not whether Ahmadis are unpopular among clerics or mobs or that Islamists don’t like them. The issue is that Pakistan as a state has made their religious identity punishable, their worship suspect, and their vote and citizenship conditional.
If religious freedom means anything, it cannot depend on majority approval. For Ahmadis in Pakistan, it does.
The world should not treat their persecution as a domestic sensitivity or as a series of isolated sectarian incidents. It is a warning about a community being pushed out of equal citizenship by law, mobs, police, courts, and political silence. Pakistan’s legal and administrative system has made the persecution of a minority legally possible, allowing extremists to present discrimination as enforcement and officials to restrict victims in the name of public order. Ahmadis do not demand special treatment. What they want is the basic promise of citizenship: to live, worship, vote, and be buried without being punished for who they are.
