Why they came
On 29 May 1974 came the incident at the railway station in Pakistan, and after it the news of bloody riots against Ahmadis. Later that year the National Assembly of Pakistan declared Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority, and a campaign against the Community was already under way inside the country.
He worked out the route himself
He had read how the international protection framework worked: a member state of the United Nations was bound to grant asylum to a person persecuted at home on grounds of religion, politics, colour or race. What was missing was proof a German lawyer could use. A Hamburg newspaper had carried a report on the persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan, and he took the clipping to the lawyer, Mr Hoffmann.
As soon as I placed it before the lawyer, the lawyer jumped up upon seeing it. He said: "That’s it, now there is no problem." And within half an hour, he prepared the same kind of letter as he had previously prepared for that Bengali youth, attached that clipping to it, and said, "Take this to the police office tomorrow."
He then went back and asked the lawyer how long people who came in this way would be able to stay, and worked out what the years would cost them. Word travelled, and Ahmadi young men began arriving daily.
The mosque became the reception centre
In any case, our Masjid Noor had by this time become an asylum centre for Ahmadi friends coming from Pakistan. Whichever friends arrived, they would head straight for the Masjid. Then their case would be prepared right here, their food and lodging arrangements would be made right here, and translators would be provided for them from here as well. First, the case of each individual friend would be prepared, his particulars would be entered into a register, and then, after giving him a certificate of being Ahmadi, he would be sent along with some acquainted German friend to a lawyer. This had, as it were, become the everyday routine of this humble one.
They arrived from the airport by day and by night, and the mosque was their first stopover. An address had to be given on the application, and the mosque could not serve as one, so finding houses came first of all.
The four problems
Food
Every Pakistani could bring 500 dollars out of the country. In Pakistan that was a very large sum, and in Germany it was barely one week of expenditure. So that the money stayed with them, he opened a Langar in the Mission House and ran it frugally.
In his own account: ¶544
Language
The friends who were arriving, obviously, did not even know what bread and water were called in German. And here, from beginning to end, one had to speak, hear, and understand German alone.
At the beginning he went with them himself, from the lawyer to the police, and he started lessons in the mosque for those staying there.
Work
A non-German, even if he holds an M.A. or Ph.D., upon coming to a foreign country seems as if he is deaf and mute. And who gives work to the deaf and mute?
They took whatever work could be done without the language, from washing dishes and cleaning cauldrons to laying bricks in severe cold and selling newspapers street by street at night. He found work for them where he could, including a posting with a British Army unit in southern Germany that needed men who spoke English.
Belonging
He urged them to establish relations with local people as far as they could, to invite them into their homes and to congratulate them on their festivals. Those who acted on it found lodging and better work through it.
In his own account: ¶554
What it became
As if a home-like atmosphere had been created, so it felt to the new arrivals just as if they had left one circle of friends and come into another circle.
Individually too, every possible guidance and encouragement was given: the well educated among them were urged to learn German properly, even at their own expense, and some took formal admission at the Goethe Institut. Marriages followed, and he performed the Nikah in Masjid Noor.
The scale
By the time of ’s visit in 1976, some five hundred friends had reached Germany from Pakistan, and those living in Frankfurt and Offenbach had been divided into eight halqas.
In his own account: ¶715
The care he took
In these circumstances, I certainly took the precaution of reducing my visits to the police office, so that at least the local police would not get the impression that the Imam of the Ahmadiyya Mosque was inviting people over.
In his own account: ¶543
And then it turned
In 1989 he came to Germany with his family and went through the process himself. He found that the system of his own time had changed: applications were no longer made at the Frankfurt police but at a centre in Schwalbach, a town outside Frankfurt, where the stages were settled and applicants were lodged. The family lived in Schwalbach from January to May 1989, five months, then in a hotel in Seligenstadt, about fifty kilometres from Frankfurt, where word came that the case had been approved and the blue passports could be collected. He records that even after approval a separate house did not follow, and that families lived for years in hotels or in shared asylum housing.