Estimated at 15,000 for the entire United States, Ahmadiyya Muslims from Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia mustered almost 10 percent of that number for their Ramadan-ending feast Wednesday at a packed activity center in Frederick County.
“It was wonderful,” Amatul Noor Ahmad, a Clarksville Ahmadi, said of the Eid-ul-Fitr, which means “fast-breaking on the day of happiness” in Arabic. “When we came here in 1973, we had Eid in a very small room for two families, and we ate dinner there. Now there was this huge place [for us]. It was a very good experience.”
Ahmadiyya Muslims are a 120-year-old Islamic sect that claims to be a moderating influence on Islam and takes credit for popularizing the term “jihad” as an internal moral struggle, instead of a violent one.
“It was very nice,” Agha Khan, an Ahmadi neurosurgeon from Lutherville, said of the record-breaking feast at Frederick’s Lynfield Event Complex. “It was nice and wholesome and within the traditions.”
The sect professes mostly mainstream Islamic beliefs but holds that Muhammad was not the last of the prophets and that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, is the awaited messiah.
“Muslims are waiting for the Mahdi; Christians are awaiting the Messiah,” Anser Ahmad, president of the Potomac-Rockville-Frederick AMC chapter and an Ahmadi immigration lawyer, said at the feast. “But we believe our founder was that individual. He said not to expect anyone else. And that’s the big difference between us and other Muslims.”
Ahmadiyya Muslims also believe in the separation of mosque and state and support statehood for Israel and the Palestinian people, said U.S. AMC spokesperson Zaki Kauser. A caliph, based in London, heads the faith whose worldwide membership is estimated in the “tens of millions.”
For these reasons, Ahmadis have been legally declared to be non-Muslim in Pakistan and, adherents say, have suffered persecution and assassination as a result. An Ahmadiyya Muslim mosque on Garrison Boulevard serves the estimated 400 Ahmadis in the Baltimore area.
The separately worshipping Ahmadi men and women were addressed at the feast — where only token food items were provided the huge crowd — by Ahmadiyya Imam Daud Haneef, a regional religious leader who spoke of the need for fasting, avoiding falsehood and service to one’s neighbors.
“Service to God has no meaning,” he said, “if your service to God’s creatures is lacking.”
