Migration and Arrival

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ahmadis, like thousands of other Indians, migrated to Africa in search of new opportunities in business, the civil service, and railway construction. Ancient trading connections between India and East Africa had evolved into more intimate ties when the British Empire acquired much of both coasts along the Indian Ocean. Over half a century, Indians established lives in East Africa that were meant to be permanent. The colonial environment, however, which entrenched an artificial separation from both the British rulers and the indigenous population, was one that could not be sustained once the alien regime came to an end. The transition to majority rule engulfed the Indian community in new rules, new competition, and, in some cases, new jeopardy caused by rioting and threats of violence. In Uganda in 1972 the whole of the Asian population was forced to leave and join a refugee migration in search of new homes. Ahmadis were among those displaced.

As well, political oppression and religious persecution of their community in Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s stimulated the migration of Ahmadis abroad. In 1974 the government of Pakistan passed an amendment to the constitution that cast the community outside the pale of Islam. A decade later, an ordinance promulgated by Pakistan’s president, General Zia-ul Haq, which was subsequently supported in the Federal Shariat Court, further limited the basic freedoms of Ahmadis and their full participation in society. In many other Islamic countries, Ahmadis are persecuted or at best tolerated if they do not publicly assert their particular beliefs. These responses are the culmination of almost a century of debate and confrontation regarding the place of the Ahmadiyya movement – whether it is merely another sectarian community or the product of heretical teaching and an enemy of Islam.

The first Ahmadis in Canada arrived at Halifax in the 1930s. They were individual migrants who had come to study or, in a few cases, to settle, but no community life was possible until a larger migration began in the 1960s. Increased numbers and greater concentration in Ontario, particularly Toronto, allowed for the beginning of community building in 1966, when the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, Ontario was officially incorporated. There are approximately 10,000 Ahmadis living in Canada today. This may be a conservative estimate since the movement is growing. Most members of the community have emigrated from Pakistan, but Ahmadis have come as well from East Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and India, and there is an increasing number of Canadian-born converts.