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Petropolis

Fleeing violent persecution in Pakistan, Ahmadi Muslims have scattered across the globe—including to Brazil. In Petrópolis, a city historically associated with exiles, one missionary imam and his family spent 11 years constructing an Ahmadi mosque open to all. While promoting pacifism, the Ahmadiyya community continues to express itself politically through international missionary activity, including in Israel.
Vantage of Baitul Awal, acrylic painting and graphic artwork, 12 x 8 inches. Courtesy of Prithi Khalique.






The Ahmadis of Petrópolis
The Baitul Awal mosque is a surprise. Located in Petrópolis, Brazil, a mountain city of about 300,000, a little more than 40 miles outside Rio de Janeiro, the mosque's expanse belies its unconventional setting. A handsome white structure that rises from a fringe of gardens, it sits halfway up a mountain slope with houses hanging off. A sign says that it belongs to the Ahmadi Association of Islam in Brazil. When you assume its vantage point, looking in the direction it faces, you see a shallow valley that blurs into the Serra dos Órgãos mountain range.
Brazil may not be a country known for its Muslim population, but it is where enslaved Muslims from West Africa led one of the most important revolutions against slavery in the Americas in 1835. Roughly around the same year—sources vary—Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born in Qadian, Punjab, then part of British India. In 1889, Ahmad established a new Islamic movement called the Ahmadiyya Jamaat and declared himself its first caliph. One year prior, slavery was finally abolished in Brazil.
The fifth and present caliph, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, has governed the Ahmadiyya community since 2003. Wasim Ahmad Zafar, an Ahmadi Muslim imam and missionary from Rabwah, Pakistan, organized the construction of the Petrópolis mosque. He has lived there with his family since 1993; before this, he was posted in Guatemala. Among Islam's heterogeneous adherents, Ahmadi Muslims distinguish themselves by explicitly subscribing to a missionary ethos, sending emissaries around the world to proselytize. Despite having outposts in virtually every country of the world, they make up only about 1% of Muslims.
“The Ahmadiyya Jamaat isn’t another school of thought,” Zafar said in an interview. We spoke in Urdu after lunch at his home. “Our school of thought is Islam.” According to Ahmadi Muslims, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was sent to unify the Muslim community in response to its fragmentation during the late colonial period. They view him as the messiah and mahdi, a ruler prophesied to arrive in the end times to integrate a variegated global faith. Although they preach nonviolence, they have been subject to violent persecution from many other Muslims. Meanwhile, the community has also experienced a fracture, with the 1914 separation of Lahori Ahmadis.
“In the whole world, there is only one Muslim community with a caliph,” Zafar said. “And to have a caliph, this assures us that Allah Ta’ala is with our community.” There is a disconnect between how a large number of Muslims perceive them—as foreign to Islam—and how they perceive themselves—as torchbearers of its essence. Ahmadi Muslims regard their centralization under a living caliph as evidence of divine sanction and yearn to bring others under the umbrella. The community even has a motto: "Love for All, Hatred for None."

This April, following Eid ul-Fitr, Zafar and his family hosted the 30th jalsa salana, or annual assembly, at the mosque. It was presented as an inter-faith exchange, with speakers including a Jewish woman leader, Black Buddhist monk, Umbanda priest, and representative of the civil police. His sons, Nadeem, Ijaz, and Takreem, alternately emceed, translated speeches into Portuguese, and sang Urdu ghazals, and the woman sitting in front of me teared up. Zafar presented a single red rose to every speaker.
Afterwards, the women of the family served a meal in the garden that they had prepared. I spoke to Zafar's youngest daughter, Aila, a dentistry student who had invited her friend, an Indigenous biologist-in-training who talked about the jewelry she makes out of insect wings.
For our interview a few months later, the women cooked another meal. Zafar's wife, Anila, and their daughters-in-law, Nida and Maria, brought chicken curry, chickpeas, pulao, parathas, salad, fruit, and gajar ka halwa to the table. They served it in their home, which is situated next to the mosque. Zafar pinched red chili powder from a bowl and sprinkled it over his plate. He had just returned from a jalsa tour of sorts: from Virginia, to Toronto, to the global Ahmadiyya headquarters in the town of Islamabad in Surrey, England, where 43,000 guests had joined.
In keeping with the Ahmadi motto, outsiders are encouraged to come as they are to the mosque. This stands in contrast to the majority of mosques, which police women's dress, yet can also feel geared towards conversion. “Some time ago, a women’s group came, with girls too. It’s obvious that non-Muslims will be without dupattas, with bare heads. I uploaded photos of them like that and some Muslims messaged me saying that I did something wrong allowing these women inside,” Zafar said. “So I responded to them with love, saying that if we don’t allow someone inside and don’t show them the beauty [of our faith], how will they realize it?”
The first time I went to the mosque, the weekend before Ramadan, I was wearing a jumpsuit covered with red zebra stripes. No one seemed to mind. I was struck by the hedge in front landscaped to read “Paz,” or peace, and the second-floor library with copies of the Qur'an translated into 60 languages as widely ranging as Bhojpuri and Russian.

Ijaz, Zafar's middle son and a civil engineer who aims to improve Petrópolis' resilience to landslides, led a tour of the mosque, showing the visitor apartments built into it. His youngest son, Takreem, brought freshly brewed chai and biscuits from the house. He said that he wanted to be a missionary like his father and perhaps go to Africa. For the Zafar grandchildren, the third generation here, the garden is a playground. Switching between Urdu and Portuguese, they run around looking for hummingbirds and butterflies.
As of 2024, Zafar said that there are approximately 53 Ahmadi Muslims in Brazil. He claimed that the community used to be larger, but many professionals moved on to Canada or the US for work. His missionary activity in Brazil involves traveling — he has visited all 26 states — and using political platforms to increase awareness of Islam as a religion of peace. Several Brazilian converts appear to be married to members of his extended family who are based in the country. The community's small numbers in Brazil do not seem to deter Zafar. "Our work isn’t to bring people in, unless their hearts are in it,” he said.
Since its beginning, the missionary tradition has been a fundamental aspect of Ahmadi Islam. The earliest overseas Ahmadiyya mission dates to 1913, in London. By 1920, missions had spread to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, China, West Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, according to historian Nile Green. For many communities around the world, the Ahmadiyya community was their first introduction to Islam. I wondered if, and how, this family in Petrópolis thought about the damage evangelical missionaries have historically wrought in Brazil, from incursions into Indigenous territories to pro-Bolsonaro pentecostalists in favelas.
Green notes how the multiplicity of religious organizations that emerged in South Asia at the turn of the twentieth century worked in a competitive religious marketplace, borrowing methods from Christian evangelicals and contributing to the “market production of sectarianism.” Ahmadi Muslims made a point of building mosques in their new territories and taking advantage of the technologies available to them, founding and distributing newspapers to disseminate their beliefs.
Newspaper articles tend to follow Zafar's travels. After the interview, he pulled out a binder to show me Portuguese clippings he has collected about the community since the 1990s. "The media here is so good,” he said. "They write what we believe, even when it’s different from what they believe.”
But he added, "In freedom, they [Brazilians] have gone very far. And they don’t want any prohibitions. With affection and love, we want to show them that freedom happens within a limit. If you go outside of the limit in the name of freedom, then it will not be freedom.” He drew a parallel with the need for traffic rules while driving. "This is a simple matter that we’re trying to teach them. It will take time, but with love, we’re guiding them.” This kind of paternalism is perhaps intrinsic to the missionary project, regardless of religious tradition.

Zafar opened the mosque in 2016, having begun the process in 2005. It took a long time to get permission from the Petrópolis city council to build it, because the neighborhood it is in was zoned as residential. Designed by a Pakistani architect, its construction was funded by the Ahmadiyya community. "We do dua that Allah brings faithful people to our masjid and it fills up," Anila Zafar told me.
Pakistan has the world’s largest population of Ahmadi Muslims. Here, the competitive marketplace of Islamic variants has hardened into institutionalized persecution of non-Sunnis. Declared non-Muslims by the constitution in 1974, Ahmadi Muslims are forbidden from basic Islamic practices, such as saying salam, playing the adhan from their mosques, or referring to their mosques as such. They have to identify themselves on their documents, which leads to discrimination at school and work, affecting livelihoods and economic mobility. In recent years, they have again lost the right to vote, as well as, Zafar chuckles at the absurdity of this, to carry out qurbani, or sacrifice animals for the hungry, on Eid ul-Adha. The latter contributes towards zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. Most gravely, they face a constant threat of arbitrary arrests and detention by the state and state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence, disappearances, and murder just by virtue of their interpretation of Islam.
Zafar was born in Rabwah, Pakistan, in 1959, the city created post-Partition as a home for the Ahmadis. When he was a teenager, he began the seven-year-long process of missionary training, where he had a scriptural education in the Quran and hadiths, as well as in how to cultivate qualities important to a missionary such as patience and restraint. His family is originally from Qadian, the birthplace of Ahmadi Islam, and his grandfathers on both sides converted. While he acknowledges his pain at the mistreatment of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, this also shores up his faith: "We forget that any prophet meets disbelief and resistance from the people,” he said.
His preferred method of arbitration lies in the spiritual realm, even though he engages with the political sphere in Brazil—a duality ingrained in the Ahmadi Muslim approach. When we first met, he had just returned from Brasilia, the capital, where he said he had been providing a Muslim perspective on Palestine. Although the Ahmadiyya caliph has released statements in support of Palestine, pointing to the Ahmadi Muslims who live and have suffered in Gaza, the community continues to maintain a mosque in Haifa, Israel.
"I've heard of it, but I've never seen it," Anila Zafar said. "There is one in every country…We have a presence everywhere." There does not seem to be a point at which the community will boycott Israel, closing their center or reducing their missionary presence there. What does it mean to be a persecuted Muslim minority with a missionary presence in Israel, supportive of Palestine but also conveniently painted by Israel as the “good Muslims”?
"If there is oppression in Palestine, if all this is happening in Pakistan, should I gather a group here, go on the road, bother people, what’s the use of that? If I break some car windows here, will that have any use? That’s why this isn’t what the Ahmadiyya community does. If we have certainty in our hearts, that there is God, and Allah Ta’ala loves us, then what else do we need?” Wasim Zafar asked.
He referred to an incident in Pakistan in 2010 in which Ahmadi mosques were attacked and over 90 Ahmadis were massacred. Following that, he stated, there were no Ahmadis on the roads protesting because of their motto. They chose peace, he said.
To him, the conflicts that have affected Muslim states are further proof of their dividedness. According to Zafar, the fate of places like Palestine and Iraq, and the reason for their experience of oppression, has been the lack of unity among Muslim states. The reason the Arab countries have not been able to handle Israel is also a result of their lack of unified leadership. This focus on division within the Muslim world echoes the position of the global Ahmadiyya leadership, departing from mainstream clerics in places like Pakistan and the United States who frequently point to empire's excesses to explain contemporary crises.
The German immigrants who initially settled Petrópolis recreated an alpine community in the subtropical Serra dos Órgãos mountains. Similarly, the Zafars and the community they have built have rooted themselves here, bringing with them perceptions, leanings, and desires from their homeland. Anila Zafar leads the women's wing, which was meeting the afternoon I was there. "Women can understand what other women say better," she said. She closed her words with a Portuguese-Urdu-Arabic mashup: "Vamos fazer dua.” Let’s make dua.
It may not be surprising after all that there is an Ahmadi Muslim mosque in Petrópolis. The city, named after the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II, is associated with exiles. Probably the most famous is Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer who overdosed on barbiturates along with his wife Elisabet, upon realizing that they could not leave behind the horrors of war in Europe, even when in the mountains of Brazil. Their house is now a memorial to exiles.
Petrópolis is also synonymous with its many house museums. There is of course the Brazilian royal family's summer palace, comprising a dual escape: from Napoleon in Europe and from the heat in Rio. Then there is the Franco-Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont's house without a kitchen. Finally, just down the road from the mosque where the Zafars live, there is the House of Seven Errors, whose right and left sides are purposely incongruous—not unlike the curious intersection of a community persecuted at home, while willingly serving as missionaries abroad. Among this list of house-museums and exiles, settlement and flight, lies the Ahmadi Association of Islam in Brazil.

SUB-HEAD
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Profile
Petropolis
Brazil
Ahmadi
Ahmadiyya
Baitul Awal Mosque
Persecution
Religious Conflict
religious divide
Pakistan
Lahore
Punjab
Ahmadi Association of Islam
Brazil Ahmadi Association of Islam
pacifist
pacifism
Jalsa
sectarianism
messianic faiths
Islam
extrajudicial violence
Extrajudicial Killings
syncretism
religious syncretism
Atlantic forest
diaspora
missionary
missionary faith
dawa
market production of sectarianism
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
Mirza Masroor Ahmad
Ahmadiyya Jamaat
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21st
Jan
2025
AUTHOR
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