Internal xenophobia and the ‘othering’ of the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan

How has the Ahmadiyya community fared in Pakistan's political landscape? This article examines the systematic xenophobic othering and structural violence perpetrated against the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan through the intersecting dynamics of state apparatuses, religious nationalism, and societal practices. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks from post-colonial nationalism, and cultural identity studies, we argue that the Ahmadiyya have been constructed as the ‘internal other’ within Pakistan's socio-political landscape, a construction that facilitates their exclusion, persecution, and economic marginalization. Pakistan's nation-building project, we contend, has relied on rigid identity binaries that exclude religious minorities from the national imaginary. This state-sponsored ‘othering’ of the Ahmadiyya community has been enacted through legal and judicial systems, societal and cultural othering, educational policies, and media discourses, producing what Thomas Blom Hansen terms ‘the law of the excluded middle’, where complex religious identities are reduced to binary oppositions between ‘authentic Muslims’ and ‘heretical others’. Through analysis of constitutional amendments, judicial decisions, and state discourses, this article demonstrates how systematic othering and ‘dehumanization processes’ described by Judith Butler have been institutionalized and internalized in the form of ‘internal xenophobia’ against Ahmadis, resulting in their structural marginalization and sustained exposure to violence.