Abstract

This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India’s Ahmadiyya Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minority – people for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: what evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith?

In this talk I will explore how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in the town of Qadian in northern Indian. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya Community’s founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis’ spiritual leader – the khalifa – since partition and the believers who nowadays live there and act as its guardians must daily confront the reality of this separation even while attempting to make their Muslimness verifiable. By exploring the centrality of this separation to the ethics of everyday life in Qadian, I will examine the doubts and certainties that people in Qadian experience as they attempt to foreground the verifiability of their own Muslim identity.

Our speaker

Dr Nicholas Evans teaches anthropology at the LSE, where he is a Fellow. His work on India has focused on the contested boundaries of Islamic orthodoxy and the question of who can claim the right to be a Muslim. He is author of Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian (Cornell, 2019). He has also written about doubt, theisms and religious uncertainty, and the problem of speaking across different ethical and religious traditions.

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