THE murder of a shopkeeper in Glasgow on March 24th has drawn attention to Britain’s relatively small and unknown community of Muslims called the Ahmadiyya. Asad Shah, who ran a flourishing newsagent’s in Scotland’s second city, was one of about 30,000 Ahmadis in Britain. He was killed by a Sunni Muslim, Tanveer Ahmed, who travelled up from Bradford, in the north of England. Mr Ahmed released a statement through his lawyer, justifying the killing on the grounds that Mr Shah had “disrespected” Islam. This points to the deep hostility towards the Ahmadis among many other Muslims, and provokes the worry that such sectarianism, which has flourished in countries like Indonesia and Pakistan, may now have arrived in Britain. The British Ahmadis, who built the country’s first mosque, in 1924 in Putney, south London, are part of a worldwide community that is thought to number about 10-20m, representing about 1% of Muslims. The Ahmadis differ from the mainstream in that they believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the 19th-century Indian who founded their tradition in 1889, was a latter-day prophet. In many Muslims’ eyes, this makes their practice un-Islamic and blasphemous. Ahmad was also convinced that Jesus survived his ordeal on the cross—to die as an old man, in Kashmir. This challenges orthodox Islam, too, which holds that Jesus was raised alive to heaven. Consequently Pakistan’s Ahmadis, of whom there may be 4m, were declared to be non-Muslims by the government in 1974. Then in 1984 General Zia ul Haq, Pakistan's Sunni dictator, amended the laws again. Henceforth Ahmadis were prohibited from professing their faith, and banned from “indirectly or directly posing as a Muslim”. Even saying asalaam aleikum was out of bounds, though Pakistan has no other common greeting. In effect, their faith had been criminalised.

The Ahmadi creed is “Love for all, hatred for none” and they have been at the forefront of anti-extremism and anti-radicalisation campaigns in Britain and elsewhere. However this has not spared them the wrath of extremists from their own faith. Most egregiously, in 2010 gunmen entered two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore and killed 95 worshippers. Hundreds of Ahmadis in Pakistan have been charged with religious offences over the past decades, but very rarely are the perpetrators of anti-Ahmadi violence bought to justice. In Indonesia in 2011 a mob attacked a local Ahmadi congregation, killing three and seriously injuring five in a frenzy of violence. The perpetrators received ridiculously light sentences, none of them more than six months in prison. They were not even accused of murder.

In view of this persecution and violence, Britain has become something of a haven for the Ahmadiyya. Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the fifth khalifa (or leader) of the sect is now based in London and the annual worldwide gathering of the community takes place in rural Hampshire. So the killing of Asad Shah has come as a particular shock to the British Ahmadis. For some, it is the culmination of years of anti-Ahmadi propaganda within the country, beamed into homes by a variety of Muslim-owned satellite channels and propagated by visiting imams from Pakistan. One organisation, the Khatme Nubuwwat (meaning “finality of the Prophethood”) exists solely to counter what it sees as the falsehoods of the Ahmadiyya; it operates freely. Ahmadis must hope that the brutal sectarian murder of Asad Shah will remain an isolated incident.