WEA Associate Secretary General for Theological Concerns and Director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom (IIRF), Professor Thomas Schirrmacher, thanked the 40.000 participants of the Ahmadiyya Jalsa Salana in Karlsruhe, the yearly meeting of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat in Germany for not only enjoying religious freedom in Germany after having fled death threats in Pakistan, but in turn loudly and insistingly speaking out for religious freedom and against any violence or compulsion in religion.
Among other things Schirrmacher called upon Pakistan to change its constitution, which states, that Islam is the State Religion, only Muslims have full rights and in an extra paragraph that Ahmadis are no Muslims.
On behalf of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), Prof. Thomas Schirrmacher has for the second time met with ‘His Holiness’ Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the fifth Caliph of Ahmadiyya Muslims. The two met this time in the Caliph’s headquarters in London. The discussion revolved around the common struggle for religious freedom.
Leading individuals carrying responsibility within Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat thanked the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR), the IIRF and the World Evangelical Alliance for their efforts to protect Ahmadiyyas around the world and for their having repeatedly criticized Pakistan for killing Ahmadiyyas, for persecuting them, and for constitutionally denying them citizenship.
Schirrmacher had already met the fifth Caliph in 2014 in Karlsruhe and spoken to the 34,000 visitors for rejecting all forms of violence against those who think differently. The Ahmadiyyas are a great model for political Islam’s perpetrators of violence. 2017 Schirrmacher met the Caliph of Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat in London and spoke at the conference there.
Schirrmacher, as the Director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom, has repeatedly pointed out that in his view Ahmadiyya Muslims often are victims first and then Christians next, for instance in Pakistan or in Indonesia.
Persecution in Sunni Muslim countries and above all in the home country of Pakistan is primarily traceable back to the fact that according to Mohammad, there are not to be any further prophets. Adherents of special variations of Islam with a prophet after Mohammad are, as a general rule, more strongly discriminated against than Jews and Christians and are not categorized as a religion of the book, but as pagans and idolators.
In contrast to the large majority of Sunni and Shiite theologians, the Ahmadiyya Muslim community campaigns for religious freedom and strictly rejects violence as a means to spreading Islam.
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