Hibbah al Hayee and Salman Ahmad, in an interview room at the Mangere centre.

A couple of weeks into the programme, in an interview room at the Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre, Salman and Hibbah explained, with some help from Auckland Urdu interpreter Arshid Jamil, why they fled Pakistan. The couple are from Nankana Sahib, in the Punjab province in the north of Pakistan. Like many Pakistani couples, they are cousins, and married in 2008. Hibbah, 35, is a teacher of clothing design and dressmaking, which explains why each time we meet, her daugher is wearing a different, spectacular tailormade dress. Salman, 33, is an industrial electrician. Their troubles are religious. They are Ahmadis (or Ahmadiyya) – followers of a Muslim sect founded in the Punjab in the 1880s by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who considered himself the Messiah prophesied by Muhammad.

If you are an Ahmadi in Pakistan, you can basically go to jail for saying hello.

Though the vast majority of Ahmadi beliefs and practices are identical to those of other Muslims, the differences are enough that followers have long faced discrimination from some mainstream Muslims. There are now 10-20 million Ahmadis around the world, with the largest group – possibly as many as four million – living in Pakistan, and that is where the discrimination against them is the most acute. Following anti-Ahmadi riots in 1974, Pakistan’s constitution redefined “Muslim” so as to explicitly exclude Ahmadis. In 1984 then-president General Zia passed a law making it a criminal offence for Ahmadis to “pose as Muslims”. Thus Ahmadis are technically breaking the law and face up to three years in jail if they have the temerity to publicly quote from their holy book, the Koran, or perform a Muslim call to prayer, or refer to their mosque as a “mosque”, or even, astonishingly, use the Islamic greeting “as-salaam-alaikum”. In other words, if you are an Ahmadi in Pakistan, you can basically go to jail for saying hello. To hear Hibbah and Salman, and the two other Ahmadi refugee families, talk about the years before they fled was to be powerfully reminded of stories you read about the lives of Jews in the early years of Nazi Germany: ordinary folk living ordinary lives that gradually became less and less tenable at the hands of rabble-rousing bigots and acquiescent officials, all against a backdrop of intermittent extreme violence. A 2015 Ahmadi-authored report estimated 250 Ahmadis had been killed for their religious beliefs since 1984. Hibbah said Ahmadis in Pakistan don’t look, dress or act especially different from anyone else, but anti-Ahmadi activists would follow them from their mosques or community events, in order to identify and then publicly humiliate them. At the vocational college where she taught design, the religious group Tehreek-e-Khatme Nabuwwat posted anti-Ahmadi posters in her classroom, and organised a student strike demanding that she be fired. In 2011 school administrators transferred her to a school 80km to the north, but the victimisation followed her, and she was transferred another two times.

In 2012 religious extremists posted anti-Ahmadi signs in Hibbah Al Hayee’s sewing classroom in Panwan, Pakistan. Before she fled fearing for her life, she documented the harassment in a cellphone video. The poster on the class wall outlines the 1973 laws that made it illegal for Ahmadis (also known as Qadianis) to call themselves Muslims. Translated from Urdu, it reads:



Obligations on Qadianis According to 1973 constitution.



1-Qadianis can’t call their prayer area a Mosque.



2-They cannot call for prayer.



3-They cannot claim themselves as Muslims.



4-They cannot declare their faith as Islam.



5-They cannot preach their religion.



Qadianis are conspiring to abandon this law. We have to make everyone aware of this law because it is our faith and responsibility.









“Wherever I went,” said Hibbah (in Urdu), “people were told, ‘Look, she’s a non-Muslim, and you cannot communicate with her.’ It got to the point where even if I wanted to travel in a rickshaw they wouldn’t let me sit in it. They would abuse me and say if you don’t leave the college, we will kill you.” Salman faced similar alienation by his work-mates – “you can’t sit with us; you can’t associate with us” – but the final straw for them both came one evening in early 2013, not long after someone had warned the couple that they were on an extremist hit list. Salman was waiting to meet Hibbah off her bus journey from work, when he was attacked by four men carrying sticks. He escaped on his motorbike and rang Hibbah to tell her to stay on the bus until a later stop, and late that night the family fled to Hibbah’s parents’ house in Lahore. Even there, though, they didn’t feel safe. The time had come to leave forever. Thailand isn’t a great place to be a refugee – it’s not a signatory to the 1951 Convention on Refugee Rights, so refugees are treated as illegal immigrants even if their applications for resettlement are being processed by the United Nations – but it’s relatively easy for Pakistanis to get tourist visas there, so Bangkok is where they ran to first. There was a delay after an official in Lahore refused to give a visa to Ahmadis, but in Karachi they got lucky. Ten weeks after the bus-stop beating they were on a flight to Bangkok. It’s a mark, perhaps, of how reluctant they were to leave Pakistan that they hadn’t already done so three years earlier. In May 2010, Salman was at Friday prayers at the Ahmadi Bait-al Noor mosque in Lahore when two grenade-wielding gunmen from the Pakistan Taliban (not to be confused with the Afghan Taliban) killed 27 worshippers and wounded many more (a simultaneous attack on another Ahmadi mosque in the city killed 60). For 40 minutes Salman lay on the floor as bullets flew overhead. “The bullets would strike the concrete pillars in the mosque and ricochet,” said Hibbah, “but because he was so thin the bullets managed to miss him.” Salman is, indeed, extremely thin, but Hibbah was of course just kidding. She has a knack for finding the darkly comic moments within their grim story, and a laugh is never far away. In her teens she was a regional cycling champ, and she competed in numerous athletic events at an all-Pakistan games in Lahore. She often gently teases her husband, and you get the feeling that even if she weren’t the stronger speaker of English, she’d still be the one leading the conversation. Theirs was an arranged marriage, and Hibbah thinks their families chose well. “He is a good husband. Very cooperative, and he gives me freedom. I can do everything.” It was a long and difficult three-and-a-half years in Thailand. Salman and Hibbah couldn’t legally work, and Attia couldn’t attend school. Hibbah had two miscarriages. They were liable to be arrested and detained at any time, and Attia developed a terrible fear of police. The two other families who arrived on the same flight from Bangkok have their own stories. Sarfraz Ahmad – who is Hibbah’s brother – was in the other Lahore mosque that was attacked that day in 2010 and has five bullet-wounds to prove it. His family followed Hibbah’s to Bangkok in 2014, and while they were there his daughter died of a medical condition.

Sarfraz Ahmad, Hibbah’s brother.

Imran Ahmad (no relation – “Ahmad” is a religious signifier rather than a last name in the Western sense) had a hardware store in the Ahmadi-majority and thus relatively safe city of Rabwah, but his business was ruined when Lahore wholesalers refused to sell stock to him as an Ahmadi. In Bangkok, his wife Mansoora and their daughter were caught in a police round-up and spent the last three months before leaving for New Zealand in a detention centre. During that time Imran’s elderly mother, who had been nursed by Mansoora, died. Hibbah and Salman didn’t mind where they ended up – they just wanted out – but last year, they finally learnt they would be going to New Zealand. They knew nothing about the place, but with the help of Google they started researching their future home. Two weeks in, they still hadn’t seen much beyond the refugee centre, but they had attended prayers at a nearby Ahmadi mosque. Hibbah was still adjusting to the idea of being in a place where they didn’t face discrimination. “They’ve told us no one is going to bother you here about your religion or your culture, because there are so many cultures here – something like 160.” But a few minutes later, as the photographer was discussing where to take a portrait of the family, Sarfraz bustled to the door waving his smartphone. News had just come through from associates in Pakistan: Malik Saleem Latif, the local leader of Ahmadis in Nankana Sahib, had been murdered – shot off the pillion seat of his son’s motorcycle as they rode to work. Salman and Hibbah inspected their phones, and anxiously conferred with Sarfraz.

Breaking news: Stuff’s interview with the Ahmadi refugees was interrupted by news from home that a local Ahmadi leader had been assassinated.