Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Stephen Hammond Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey), my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening) and the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), who is almost an hon. Friend, as we share a border. She referred to the Baitul Futul mosque, which spans our two constituencies. It is where we meet, and as she rightly pointed out, it is the largest mosque in the UK and rumoured to be the second largest in Europe. Like my right hon. Friend and many others in this House, I have been pleased to visit it over many years and to visit the mosque in Putney.

When I was first selected as a candidate, some 18 years ago, the Ahmadiyya community was one of the first to come to see me and to say, “This is what we are doing in the community. How can we work together?” They take part in a number of community events—I wish to stress that at the beginning, before we get on to some of the details. A number of speakers have described this work: the community litter days; and the junior poppy collection day, supporting the people who stood up for freedom in this country and the world when it was required in those dark days some 70 years ago. They recognise the memory of that, and it is symbolic in today’s debate.

The Ahmadiyya community also afforded me the most amusing moment of my first year as a Member of Parliament. Every year, they hold a huge Jalsa Salana for the community all around the world. In those days, it was held in Alton, but it has now moved to a bigger farm in north-west Hampshire. As we drove off, my wife said to me, “You are speaking at this event this afternoon. How many people will be there? Have you prepared something?” I said, “Darling, it is a religious ceremony. If we are lucky, there will be a couple of hundred people there.” Members can imagine my surprise when I stood up to address 30,000 people live and a couple of million more watching on the TV—as they reminded me there. That was a salutary lesson: always try to be prepared before standing up to make a speech, wherever you make it.

Let me get on to the serious points about today. I tried to make an initial serious point about how Ahmadis are integral to my community and to those of so many Members across the House. As we have seen, this community encompass and epitomise their slogan—“Love for all, hatred for none”—and they do so in practical ways. All of us in this House stand up for people’s ability to speak freely and to practise freedom of religion and of political expression. We seek to ensure that people are not allowed to prosecute hate in their speech or actions. In the tour around the world undertaken in the speech of the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden, she not only rightly concentrated on Pakistan, but rightly pointed out, as the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton has just done, that we need to look at a number of issues. If we espouse these values in this House, we should espouse them in the actions taken in our country, too.

One or two people have talked about the worrying development of hate preachers coming to the UK and deliberately infusing hate against the Ahmadiyya community in some of the other mosques. I know from local experience that there was a widespread campaign to boycott Ahmadiyya businesses and shops, which was prosecuted by some of these hate preachers. The hon. Lady was right to mention the TV programme on Waltham Forest, and a Radio 4 documentary “Extremism: Hidden in Plain Sight” revealed recently that certain Urdu newspapers in the UK, which are particularly popular among elements of the Pakistani community, were running deliberate hate campaigns against the Ahmadiyya community. So although I understand this is a debate about persecution in the world, the right hon. Gentleman is right to say that we hope the Minister will say that he will speak to Home Office colleagues to make sure we are doing all we can to ensure that persecution does not happen in this country. If we do that, when we speak to the outside world, we will be able to do so with the surety that we are acting to drive out that extremism and hate in this country.

It would be unwise of me to do a tour of the world as the hon. Lady did, but I should say that this persecution is widespread. My right hon. Friend the Member for Putney and others have made the point that it is the Pakistan state that puts this persecution into law. Other states, such as Egypt and Kazakhstan, allow persecution, but the Pakistan state, by putting this into law, has made this official persecution. In Pakistan, the Ahmadis are not allowed to call themselves Muslim, they cannot refer to their faith as Islam, they cannot call their place of worship a mosque and they cannot preach or propagate their faith. There is deliberate inequality of opportunity in education and in terms of practising whatever profession they may wish to do.

Although I absolutely respect the Minister’s correct position that much can be achieved in private and with methods that are sometimes not public, I believe that it is occasionally important also to use the megaphone, to use his analogy. He will recognise that this persecution is becoming more widespread and more frequent, and several Members have cited examples, but let me put on the record what Christian Solidarity Worldwide has said in the conclusion of its report on the persecution of the Ahmadiyya community. It said:

“The mood of aggression by certain Islamist groups towards the Ahmadiyya community shows no sign of improvement, even the Pakistani government has lacked the political will to make concession to their community.”

It continued:

“The exclusionary politics…has steadily grown since the creation of Pakistan”

and is playing

“an important role”

in other states in the world.

As the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton said, this is an increasing problem, not a decreasing one. The Minister for the Middle East has made the point several times at the Dispatch Box about the number of times we are speaking to the Pakistani Government. Given the increasing nature of this problem and how it is now becoming, as others have said, more or less commonplace and accepted practice in certain countries, I hope that the Minister will say something about what influence the Foreign Office can exert, both publicly and privately.