Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses diasporic UK Ahmadiyya Muslims through the lens of performance and practice. It conceptualizes recognition as a means by which the group produces internal identity and performs this identity with external state authorities to assist persecuted Ahmadi in the subcontinent.

Paper long abstract:

Ahmadiyya Muslims comprise a small but active proselytizing community which has its origins in colonial India. Ahmadiyya migrants and refugees have now established transnational lives in the diaspora because discrimination and persecution in Pakistan and elsewhere makes it impossible for them to remain in their countries of origin. Drawing on the work of Schneiderman, Povinelli and others, my fieldwork in the UK considers how members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community have produced a shared identity through prayer, charity and education which instill ethical practice and a distinctive Ahmadiyya history and mission in its members. The recognition of Ahmadiyya identity can be understood though the terms performance and practice as theorised by Schneiderman. The practices which result in group-internal identity production are performed for non-Ahmadiyya audiences when the Ahmadiyya engage with political and other external authorities. While recognition of the Ahmadiyya is in Pakistan constituted as negative, the outcome of decades of religio-political conflicts in the subcontinent, in the UK, where the Ahmadiyya have established themselves as a moderate, community-focused minority, recognition is more positive. In this paper I consider how the Ahmadiyya seek visibility and gain recognition from British members of Parliament and others, through formal and informal interactions to ameliorate the conditions of the silenced, disenfranchised and persecuted members of the Ahmadiyya community living in Pakistan. In this way the visibility and recognition the Ahmadiyya can harness in the diaspora is strategically employed to promote support for the Ahmadiyya in the subcontinent who are denied the recognition they seek.