An e-mail I received recently began: “30,000 Muslims in London pledge allegiance to the caliphate”. Well, it certainly got my attention, but the caliph in question was not that rather humourless chap in Syria but Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the softly spoken leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community.

You may have seen their slogan — “Love for all, hatred for none” — or noticed their young men selling poppies outside Tube stations, an act of charity they carry out as a symbol of loyalty to Britain, but which also reflects older ties to our armed forces in India.

Morden in south London is the worldwide headquarters of the Ahmadi caliphate, home to Europe’s largest mosque, the Baitul Futuh, which last week almost burned down.

The sect began in British India after Mirza Ghulam Ahmad declared himself the promised messiah — the Mahdi — in 1889 and they see Christ, Krishna and Buddha as prophets. This mix of all major religions, or syncretism as it is called, is very attractive to modern people who find it arrogant that one ancient faith might claim absolute truth over another.

Many are also drawn to their embrace of education, free enquiry (they accept evolution) and tolerance, while also sharing the more attractive elements of Abrahamic religion. And yet their history has a sad undercurrent.

Over the past 40 years persecution has intensified in Pakistan, where they are considered heretics.

In 2013 a 72-year-old British Ahmadi doctor was arrested there for “posing as a Muslim” after quoting from the Koran; in 2010 in Lahore 80 people were gunned down in a mosque.

Sadly the mosque in Morden, like the beautiful Ahmadi Fazl mosque in Southfields (built in 1926 with money raised by women selling jewellery in India) also has airport-style metal detectors because of the threats they have received in Britain.

Ahmadis have been targeted and harassed at London universities, and leaflets have appeared on the streets encouraging violence; ignored by the authorities, they lament, because they are in Urdu. In fact the Ahmadi caliph was one of the first to warn of the dangers of allowing Islamist terrorists to slip into Europe alongside refugees.

This week German police were forced to separate Muslim and Christian refugees because of violence, reminding us that the great religious conflicts are being reintroduced to Europe. It is made worse because so many British people do not understand religion, while they are stuck in a 20th-century view of race relations which sees things almost literally in black and white.

In the next few weeks we’ll once again see the Ahmadis outside Tube stations raising money for former British servicemen. Perhaps Londoners could repay the favour this year with a whipround to help them rebuild their mosque.

Damian Lewis the king of the carrotheads

As a person of carroty colouring it heartens me to read that fellow ginger Damian Lewis is set to be the next James Bond. Gingerism is the last acceptable prejudice in Britain, a curious hostility that exists in no other country and is most likely a result of there being large numbers of redheads here (although it’s possibly a legacy of blond Anglo- Saxon attitudes towards flamehaired native Britons).

For those of us untannables who get sunburned in north Wales in May, Lewis’s success is our Obama moment. Curiously, if Lewis gets the job it would mean that the Prime Minister, Mayor of London, Archbishop of Canterbury and James Bond were all Old Etonians; the only major national role left is England football manager, and perhaps that’s only a matter of time.

Now you can rate people like hotels

Easily the most terrifying thing I’ve discovered this year is a new app that allows individuals to be rated like restaurants or hotels. Peeple, launched next month, will give users the chance to mark others out of five. It’s all very interesting for evolutionary biologists.

According to Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene human society is a never-ending battle between three types of people, suckers, grudgers and cheats, but technology is making life impossible for the latter. I suppose the biggest worry is not getting bad marks but lots of ironic five-star reviews, like David Hasselhoff’s musical oeuvre on Amazon.

Alternatively, perhaps having no reviews at all would be worse. Oscar Wilde said something along those lines — but then look what happened to him.