Diaspora as home: The global community of Ahmadiyya Muslims

Abstract

The spiritual home of Ahmadiyya Muslims and physical home of their leader has moved from India to Pakistan to London in under a century. These relocations signal the communal dislocation and diasporic spread of Ahmadis. Some collective experiences of migration, encompassing memories and myths of the original homeland, persist; others, including the idea that the ancestral homeland is a place of return, require a more complicated historical explication. In Ahmadi eschatology, the eventual conversion of the Earth to Ahmadiyyat is the future. Therefore, no single place can be a homeland for return when the whole globe will become theirs in time. This will constitute the very negation of diaspora as everywhere will then be home.