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In 1982, a member of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement in Cape Town filed a civil suit against certain bodies of the Muslim religious leaders (principally, the MJC or Muslim Judicial Council) claiming that he is a Muslim and entitled to all the rights of a Muslim, but that these bodies are defaming him by branding the Lahore Ahmadis as unbelievers and apostates, and are also preventing him from exercising his rights as a Muslim because he is a Lahore Ahmadi.

After three years of pre-trial submissions, and the final hearings of the case in November 1985, the Lahore Ahmadis won the case. The MJC had the assistance and support of the foremost anti-Ahmadiyya Muslim religious leaders of the world, as well as leading legal experts from Pakistan (including judges of the highest courts of Pakistan), who went to Cape Town to fight the case, but they were unable to defend their stand-point and eventually withdrew from the case.

View here a presentation (pdf format) about this Case 14 October 2014

The Ahmadiyya Case

In 1987, a book of 358 pages, entitled The Ahmadiyya Case, was published containing full details of the court case. The contents of this book (with some revisions) have been made available below:

• Foreword by Dr. Saeed Ahmad Khan, Head of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement
• Preface by the Compiler and Translator, Dr. Zahid Aziz
• The history of the Case
• The final judgment of the Court
• The evidence presented in the Case (along with Supplementary material as Appendix)

Download the entire book:

Click here to download a zip file containing all this material. After unzipping it on your PC, point your browser at your local copy of the file intro.htm (which corresponds to this page).

Images

1. See photographs from the Case

2. Report of the Judgment in the Cape Times newspaper

Case Judgment published in official Pakistan Cases Journal

The judgment of this case was published shortly afterwards in Pakistan in the March 1986 issue of the Pakistan Supreme Court Cases, a monthly journal containing selected latest judgments from various Supreme Courts. This journal is published by permission of the Government of Pakistan and the Supreme Court of Pakistan, as stated above its title on the cover page.

After the authorities in Pakistan realised the inclusion of this judgment, this issue was withdrawn on the instructions of the then government of President Zia-ul-Haq and republished without this judgment. However, copies of the original issue exist.

We present here the scanned image of this judgment as printed in the original March 1986 issue of Pakistan Supreme Court Cases.

• Cover page of Pakistan Supreme Court Cases, March 1986

  Our case is the third in the list of four cases given in the contents on the cover. The entry reads:
  ‘Ahmadis — Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was “Wali or Mujadid” and not the Prophet. Ahmadis are Muslims.’

• Pages 342–365 of Pakistan Supreme Court Cases, containing the judgment

This print of the judgment in this journal is not always clear to read. To read the text of the judgment please go to the link given further above entitled The final judgment of the court.

Maulana from South Africa misrepresents Case in 2008 interview with Pakistani newspaper

Maulana Mufti Zubair Bayat, President of the Jami‘at-ul-Ulama of the Natal province in South Africa, gave an interview in 2008 to a Pakistani newspaper in which he entirely misrepresented this court case. He claimed that it was the Ulama who took Ahmadis to court and won the verdict that they are non-Muslim.

See this link for the interview and our comments.