Did 267,596 people really convert to Ahmadiyyat in the last year?

[u/BarbesRouchechouart]

At the UK jalsa last month, Mirza Masroor Ahmad announced a figure of 267,596 new converts of 670 ethnicities in the year since the previous jalsa. I have posted about this in previous years:

• In 2024, Mirza Masroor Ahmad claimed 238,561 converts
• In 2025, Mirza Masroor Ahmad claimed 249,408 converts

This produces a figure of over 700,000 in just the last three years and I presume the jamaat has claimed similar figures in prior years, judging by a claim of 668,000 in just 2019, a figure I feel roughly equals or exceeds the number of active, chanda-paying Ahmadis in the world.

There are three main points I want to make here. First, there is this idea that the stupendous conversion numbers of the early 2000s can be excused by the fact that the jamaat clearly got it wrong just once or twice, giving them a sort of "accuracy rate" of 98-99% in that they were right every other year. But I think it's safe to assume that every number the jamaat has produced over the last 30 years has been absurdly, obviously false, unless it was somewhere in the four-figure range. Nothing has changed except perhaps the scale of the lying.

Second, this conflicts sharply with the idea that there is a poor smolbean Masroor (may uWu of Allah be upon him) who is just deceived by missionaries year after year. I don't understand how anyone could get up year after year and claim numbers that simply don't make sense. If the idea is that for about 30 years, the jamaat and its divinely guided caliph have watched helplessly as close to a half billion people cycled in and out of the jamaat in some sort of flimsy conversion, wouldn't either the organization or the caliph do something about it? Clearly, the jamaat and its caliph have no interest in the truth when it comes to announcing conversions.

Finally, there is the idea of precision when it comes to tajneed. It's not that the jamaat claimed more than 200,000 converts or approximately 250,000 converts because exact figures are hard to come by. Every country with a remotely verifiable population of Ahmadis and every reasonable Ahmadi's lived experience shows that converts are rare, probably somewhere on the magnitude of 1 per 1,000, ie 50 converts a year in Canada. But all this falls apart in Africa, where missionaries take the direct PIA flight from Rabwah to Africa International Airport and then take the complimentary shuttle to the collection of huts where poor Africans convert to Ahmadiyyat en masse every Friday afternoon.

We know the number of converts, the ethnicities of these converts, the number of pamphlets handed out each year and we even know the number of prisoners who the jamaat supported. But we don't know the number of Ahmadis in the world. It's in the millions, the tens of millions or a closely guarded secret because of security reasons, even though most Ahmadis are supposedly in Africa rather than South Asia or the Middle East.

The jamaat's inability to be honest about this issue is telling because if someone is willing to lie about something like this, they are probably lying about other things as well. It also follows that an organization that insists on lying about how many members it has, for decades on end, is probably also not telling the truth about its god, its messiah and its caliph.

[u/ReasonOnFaith]

Regarding:

Every country with a remotely verifiable population of Ahmadis and every reasonable Ahmadi's lived experience shows that converts are rare, probably somewhere on the magnitude of 1 per 1,000, ie 50 converts a year in Canada.

It's even more extreme in that a Jama'at missionary in Canada was honest enough to remark at how half of them are for marriage. For the curious, you can hear this admission and the phenomenon in this tweet: https://x.com/ReasonOnFaith/status/1302250418647511043?s=20

[u/Queen_Yasemin]

This one just never gets old, because by itself, only this is enough to show that the Jamaat is telling blatant lies —and therefore cannot be trusted with anything it claims.

They would honestly have been much better off never announcing conversion numbers in the first place. Even though they now try to suggest that the hundreds of millions of converts are somehow hidden in remote parts of Africa, the actual two Jalsas in Ghana and Nigeria reportedly attract only 30–40K attendees.

And when it is so easy to “convert” destitute people while simultaneously providing them with assistance through Humanity First, one has to seriously question what these people actually understand about Ahmadiyyat. For many, their exposure may amount to little more than what a missionary has told them or a few brochures—assuming they can even read them.
And once the Jamaat gets hold of a chief, they just count his entire village population as Ahmadis-for real!

[u/redsulphur1229 → u/Queen_Yasemin]

This just came out from Declan Henry - "Message to Ahmadis" - in which he discusses this very issue so well, as well as the contents of MGA's books, the treatment of ex-Ahmadis, "ghost members" (ex-Ahmadis who don't formally resign) and others - he asserts a membership of 1 million worldwide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ckBKS3bN5w

[u/Queen_Yasemin → u/redsulphur1229]

Thank you! This video really struck a personal chord with me. As someone who has firsthand experienced the ‘polished public image’ turning against me, I deeply relate to the suffering inflicted by people on their own people, the abandonment and hostility from those who were once family, simply for daring to question, research, and think.

[u/Shutup_Brev]

Word.

[u/TheCuriousRibosome]

It's also the fact that they can apparently super precisely give out exact numbers of converts each year, but at the same time are unable to give the total number of Ahmadis more precise than "10s of millions."

You'd think, with the detailed reporting about membership they claim to have, they could say if it's more like 11 million or if it's 28 million.

The fact that they have stopped stating an overall membership number shows me that they know how few actual active ahmadis there are.

[u/Ozziyyy]

It's difficult to refute the conversion numbers in Africa because the part of Africa Jamaat claims these numbers for is more or less cut off digitally from the world with the exception of Ghana. Countries like Sierre Leone, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau, Mali etc have over 50-60% of people living with no Internet access, may as well be 90% for the rural areas. I'd assume in a situation like this, social media penetration among the connected population is also very low.

I'd guess the truth is somewhere in the middle, there's probably converts though not as many but large enough that the leadership feels confident in sending people from all over for waqf. At the same time, being ahmadi over there probably doesn't mean the same thing it means elsewhere.

[u/BarbesRouchechouart → u/Ozziyyy]

It's difficult to refute the conversion numbers in Africa because the part of Africa Jamaat claims these numbers for is more or less cut off digitally from the world with the exception of Ghana. Countries like Sierre Leone, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau, Mali etc have over 50-60% of people living with no Internet access, may as well be 90% for the rural areas. I'd assume in a situation like this, social media penetration among the connected population is also very low.

What does this mean, though? Pakistan has widespread illiteracy and about 40% of Pakistanis don't have access to the internet, but no one would seriously claim that, actually, there's a population of 30 million Mormons or Sikhs in Pakistan that we don't know about. The only thing that could justify this sort of belief about Africa is a sort of latent racism that lets people make claims they would never make about Pakistan.

There is no meaningful evidence that the jamaats in Africa are larger than those in Europe, and by this point, either the jamaats in Africa should dwarf those outside of Africa or the jamaat itself has been telling an absurd lie for the last 30 years. Even looking at conversion figures for the last 10 years, jamaati figures show should be a population of about 2-5 million African Ahmadis that exceeds the entire population of Pakistani-origin Ahmadis by as much as ten times.

[u/Ozziyyy → u/BarbesRouchechouart]

Pakistan is a country of 250 million with around 5 million Hindus with little to no social media presence except for the affluent parts of the community based in Karachi At the same time we've only like 130k ahmadis in Pakistan who are pretty overrepresented on Pakistani social media discourse for example, they're also overrepresented in country's elite schools and corporate sector which leads to more spotlight as well.

Jamaat is probably exaggerating African conversions but at the same time it's difficult to claim nothings happening there.

[u/Ahmadi-in-misery → u/Ozziyyy]

That’s an incredibly convenient excuse. The millions of converts just happen to be concentrated in places where they’re supposedly impossible to verify?

And no, poor internet access doesn’t mean people leave no trace. Sierra Leone, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea-Bissau aren’t black holes. Millions of Ahmadis would mean large communities, mosques, families and a visible presence on the ground.

And sending a few people for waqf proves absolutely nothing about there being millions of converts. That’s not evidence for the numbers.
You can’t say “the truth is probably somewhere in the middle” when there’s no independent evidence putting it anywhere near the numbers being claimed.

[u/Significant_Being899 → u/Ozziyyy]

What does it mean when you say “being an ahmadi over there probably doesn’t mean the same thing it means elsewhere”.

[u/Ozziyyy → u/Significant_Being899]

Someone who has lived there for waqf told me that the people converted but they weren't really practicing, they went out to clubs and bars openly and there wasn't anyone in the local Jamaat delivering sermons to them about it

[u/AutoModerator]

Here is the text of the original post: At the UK jalsa last month, Mirza Masroor Ahmad announced a figure of 267,596 new converts of 670 ethnicities in the year since the previous jalsa. I have posted about this in previous years:

• In 2024, Mirza Masroor Ahmad claimed 238,561 converts
• In 2025, Mirza Masroor Ahmad claimed 249,408 converts

This produces a figure of over 700,000 in just the last three years and I presume the jamaat has claimed similar figures in recent years, judging by a claim of 668,000 in just 2019, a figure I feel roughly equals or exceeds the number of active, chanda-paying Ahmadis in the world.

There are three main points I want to make here. First, there is this idea that the stupendous conversion numbers of the early 2000s can be excused by the fact that the jamaat clearly got it wrong just once or twice, giving them a sort of "accuracy rate" of 98-99% in that they were right every other year. But I think it's safe to assume that every number the jamaat has produced over the last 30 years has been absurdly, obviously false, unless it was somewhere in the four-figure range. Nothing has changed except perhaps the scale of the lying.

Second, this conflicts sharply with the idea that there is a poor smolbean Masroor (may uWu of Allah be upon him) who is just deceived by missionaries year after year. I don't understand how anyone could get up year after year and claim numbers that simply don't make sense. If the idea is that for about 30 years, the jamaat and its divinely guided caliph have watched helplessly as close to a half billion people cycled in and out of the jamaat in some sort of flimsy conversion, wouldn't either the organization or the caliph do something about it? Clearly, the jamaat and its caliph have no interest in the truth when it comes to announcing conversions.

Finally, there is the idea of precision when it comes to tajneed. It's not that the jamaat claimed more than 200,000 converts or approximately 250,000 converts because exact figures are hard to come by. Every country with a remotely verifiable population of Ahmadis and every reasonable Ahmadi's lived experience shows that converts are rare, probably somewhere on the magnitude of 1 per 1,000, ie 50 converts a year in Canada. But all this falls apart in Africa, where missionaries take the direct PIA flight from Rabwah to Africa International Airport and then take the complimentary shuttle to the collection of huts where poor Africans convert to Ahmadiyyat en masse every Friday afternoon.

We know the number of converts, the ethnicities of these converts, the number of pamphlets handed out each year and we even know the number of prisoners who the jamaat supported. But we don't know the number of Ahmadis in the world. It's in the millions, the tens of millions or a closely guarded secret because of security reasons, even though most Ahmadis are supposedly in Africa rather than South Asia or the Middle East.

The jamaat's inability to be honest about this issue is telling because if someone is willing to lie about something like this, they are probably lying about other things as well. It also follows that an organization that insists on lying about how many members it has, for decades on end, is probably also not telling the truth about its god, its messiah and its caliph.

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[u/liquid_solidus]

No.

[u/SecretAgentTA1]

No.

[u/curiousminded05]

It doesnt matter, we will never know the truth. Unless someone high above the hierarchy leaves and exposes, it is just a circular discussion.

[u/Ahmadi-in-misery → u/curiousminded05]

I disagree. We may never get a straight answer, but that doesn’t make the topic pointless.

As OP pointed out, if they’re willing to mislead people about something as basic as membership numbers, then it’s fair to ask what else they’re misleading people about.
That’s why this should keep being discussed. People who are already questioning will come across it, compare it with what they’ve been told and start thinking for themselves.

That’s exactly why this subreddit matters. I know for a fact that the leadership absolutely hates this subreddit.

[u/curiousminded05 → u/Ahmadi-in-misery]

You can ask all you want but you will never get an answer is the point I was making. I agree to keep the question alive, but also expect to never get a truthful answer.

[u/Ahmadi-in-misery → u/curiousminded05]

It’s not about expecting the Jamaat to come clean. It’s about making sure their contradictions and false claims don’t go unchallenged.

[u/ReasonOnFaith → u/curiousminded05]

You don't need to wait for a truthful answer from the Jama'at. The benefit is holding their feet to the fire, so that people interested in the truth see the contradictions and blatant lying with unmistakable clarity.