Sources

Born 16 April 1927 in Bhera, Punjab.

He died on the evening of 4 March 2017 at Langen in Hesse, in his ninetieth year. His last home was at Obertshausen, in the country he had first been sent to as a young missionary in 1964 and had later served as Amir. His wife had died before him. Thirteen days later, at the Baitul Futuh Mosque in London, Hazrat Khalifatul Masih V (aba) led his funeral prayer in absentia.

His wife was Aisha Siddiqa.

Writing of his departure for Damascus in 1956, he records that of everyone around him it was his wife who showed the greatest patience and steadfastness, "the one who had the closest bodily and spiritual connection with me". The footnote naming her reads simply: Aisha Siddiqa.

Aisha Siddiqa suffered a chronic illness from her years in Pakistan onward, for which she was repeatedly admitted to hospital in Faisalabad. It continued through the family’s second period in Nigeria and after their move to Germany. From their permanent home in Obertshausen she was also treated for a congenital heart condition.

Aisha Siddiqa died in 2010. She had lived with him at Obertshausen, and he outlived her by seven years.

A few weeks after the family reached Nigeria she developed acute pain and a dilated pupil in her right eye. Glaucoma was diagnosed at the university hospital in Ibadan. Surgery was deferred on medical advice and the sight of that eye was lost permanently. The headaches she had endured for two and a half years were then understood to have been the same condition, untreated for want of facilities.

His daughter Hafsa was four years old when he left for Damascus in February 1956, and a second child was born about a month after his departure. When the family joined him in Nigeria, Hafsa was sixteen and his son Zakariya Ismail was twelve.

He passed the B.Sc. examination in 1950, which ended his practical connection with the Talim-ul-Islam College.

His graduating class at the Jamia numbered six: Sahibzada Mirza Hanif Ahmad, Syed Abdul Hai, his brother Sultan Mahmud Anwar, his brother Bashir Ahmad Shad, Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, and himself. Three were assigned to the Sadr Anjuman and three, including him, to Tahrik-e-Jadid.

His farewell was a four-hour picnic on the sandy bank of the Chenab, arranged by the Jamia-tul-Mubashshirin at the wish of the Principal, Maulana Abul Ata Jalandhari, and attended by Hazrat Musleh Maud (ra).

At that gathering Hazrat Musleh Maud (ra) gave him four instructions for learning Arabic: keep company with Arabs rather than Urdu and Punjabi speakers; read light material such as stories rather than great literary works; read each book several times, the first for interest and afterwards for the language; and practise thinking in Arabic, not only speaking it. He added that he had himself read one English novel eighteen times. Maulana Anweri records that this counsel served him for Arabic and later for German.

He left Rabwah on a day in February 1956 by the Chenab Express for Karachi, then sailed nine days from Karachi to Basra on an oil tanker holding only a deck ticket, went on by train to Baghdad where he stayed four days, and reached Damascus by coach.

In Damascus he lodged in the library hall of the Zawiya al-Hasani, the property of the family of As-Sayyid Munir al-Hasani. He did not attend an institute. He read his way through the Zawiya’s collection of stories, took membership of the Damascus city library and of the American Library, and studied Arabic newspapers.

He had arrived without a Syrian residence visa. After two fortnightly extensions and a further month obtained through the Pakistani ambassador Lal Shah Bukhari, the difficulty was settled by taking a half-day clerical post at the Pakistani embassy, for which he sought and received the written permission of Hazrat Musleh Maud (ra).

Sleeping one night in the library hall of the Zawiya, words came from his lips with great force and clarity: "Read books and leave the rest to Me." He describes this as his first experience of revelation, and writes that it showed him plainly the state the Promised Messiah (as) had described repeatedly in his books, an exceedingly sweet speech that flows over a man’s tongue while he sleeps.

The Tabshir office had told him in advance that he would spend six months in Damascus before going on to Ghana, to gain command of Arabic. In the event he stayed nine: he left Rabwah in February 1956 and reached Accra in November 1956. The planned six months were running out just as the Suez war broke out; a state of emergency was declared, flights to and from Damascus and Beirut were suspended, and his departure was postponed indefinitely. He left in November 1956.

He travelled by car to Beirut and flew via Benghazi to Accra, arriving on a day in November 1956. Because he had sent no word ahead, nobody met him at the airport.

The Ghana mission was already established when he arrived. Its centre was at Saltpond under Maulana Nazir Ahmad Mubashir, who lived there with his wife and two sons, Nasir Ahmad and Munir Ahmad. There was a mission house in Accra, established Jamaats, and about a dozen local missionaries. He was sent alone, for one school.

The Swedru Arabic School had one class of boys and girls aged seven to fourteen, between twenty-five and thirty pupils, no syllabus, no fixed length of study and effectively no books. He added English, the local Fanti language and arithmetic, and had elementary Arabic textbooks sent from Egypt by his friend Qureshi Nur ul-Haq Tanwir. Within the first year the roll rose to about forty or fifty.

He records that the school had been contrived by one influential elder, Al-Hajji G. E. Adam, to create employment for his son-in-law, and calls himself the scapegoat of it. When he proposed closing the fourth-year class, pupils and elders turned against him and he was instructed to hand the school to Abdullah. He writes: "Before I left Swedru, not a single pupil said goodbye to me, nor one of the elders."

During his years in Ghana he wrote a short treatise on Christianity in English, in question and answer form, published by the Jamia as "A Talk Between a Muslim & a Christian". The English mission reprinted it two or three times and translations into German and Italian were issued by the mission.

He came back from Ghana in February 1960, and spent his four months of earned leave teaching science to the ninth and tenth classes at the Talim-ul-Islam High School in Rabwah. Before the leave was over he was told to report to Jamia Ahmadiyya as a professor, under Rector Syed Mir Daud Ahmad.

At the Jamia he taught English, mathematics and Hadith to a new preparatory class, and it was on his own proposal that the class was named al-Fasl al-Awwal. He was appointed superintendent of examinations and reformed the system, having question papers properly typeset and printed instead of duplicated and answer booklets printed in the style of the Punjab University. He sat on the curriculum review committee and taught the principles of natural science to the final class, al-Daraja as-Sadisa, drawing on his own B.Sc.

He left the Jamia in 1964 and went to Germany for missionary service. He reached Frankfurt on 20 June 1964, stayed one night, and went on the next day to Hamburg, where the German mission had its head office under Chaudhry Abdul Latif. To learn German he found that the only intensive course was at a university, which required formal enrolment, for which he needed permission from the centre in Rabwah; by the time the permission came and he enrolled, about six months of his time in Germany had already gone. He was then appointed Imam of the Nur Mosque, on the Babenhäuser Landstraße in Frankfurt as he writes the address, and moved from Hamburg to Frankfurt in February 1965.

The memoir heads this chapter "My first mission period in Nigeria (July 1968 to September 1972)" and states elsewhere that he came to Nigeria as Amir and Missionary In-charge in mid-1968, taking over from Sheikh Nasiruddin.

• Corroborated by: The Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at Nigeria record of central missionaries who served in Nigeria lists him at entry 17, for 1968 to 1972 and 1983 to 1986. The record prints his name under a variant transliteration. source

Between 1968 and 1969 he divided the Agbede Circuit into four circuits: Agbede, Benin, Auchi and Agenebode. His term in Nigeria is recorded in the Nigerian Jamaat's own list of central missionaries as 1968 to 1972 and 1983 to 1986. He was succeeded in 1972 by Maulana Muhammad Ajmal Shahid.

• Corroborated by: Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at Nigeria, record of central missionaries who have served in Nigeria. source

He writes that during his four years as Amir and Missionary In-charge, new Jamaats were founded in at least twenty places, or existing groups of one or two Ahmadis grew into large communities. He names Ago Iwoye, Osho Gbo and Ako Rodo as places where there had not been a single Ahmadi before.

Hazrat Khalifatul Masih III (rh) visited Nigeria in 1970, probably in April, on his first West Africa tour, with Nigeria as the first stop. Maulana Anweri placed a garland of fresh roses on him as he came down the aircraft steps at Ikeja Airport, and a reception dinner followed at the Ambassador Hotel in Lagos.

At the meeting with General Gowon, then head of the military government, the General himself asked Hazrat Khalifatul Masih III (rh) to pray for the country. Maulana Anweri contrasts this with an earlier audience given to the Archbishop of West Africa, whom the General never once asked to pray, so that the Archbishop finally said "Let us pray" himself. Hazrat Khalifatul Masih III (rh) instructed him to record this point particularly in his report to the centre.

On that tour a mosque at Ijebu-Ode was inaugurated. It had been built at her own expense by a non-Ahmadi Muslim woman, Al-Hajja Fatima, who had the kalima set into its façade in local script, and who entrusted the mosque to the Ahmadiyya mission. Opponents in Pakistan later used photographs of that lettering to allege that Ahmadis had altered the kalima.

While he was Amir and Missionary In-charge in Frankfurt during his second German posting, the Pakistani ambassador to Germany, Syed Sajjad Haider, telephoned from Bonn asking to meet them, and came to the Nur Mosque in Frankfurt in 1974 completely alone, with no one else from the embassy. Maulana Anweri answered him with the newspaper cutting and its caption in his hand. The photograph published in Pakistan as proof that Ahmadis had changed the kalima was not of any mosque in Pakistan at all, but of the Ahmadiyya mosque in the small Nigerian town of Ijebu-Ode. That mosque had been built at her own expense by a non-Ahmadi Nigerian Muslim woman, Alhaja Fatima, who had the kalima written on its facade herself in the local Arabic hand and gave the finished building to the mission; the wording was left exactly as she had written it because, although it did not follow the script familiar in Pakistan, it was correct. The mosque had been inaugurated during the Nigeria tour of Khalifatul Masih III (rh) while Maulana Anweri was Amir and Missionary In-charge there, the photographs taken then and printed in the community's own papers. He put a challenge to the government: that if it had wanted the riots not to flare it would have said, very well, you say the Ahmadis have changed the kalima, so if your statement is proved true they are liars, and if your charge turns out false you have no right to call them liars or apostates. The ambassador's reply was only: "I will convey your views to my government."

His second period in Germany ran from 1972 to 1977, as Amir and Missionary In-charge, resident in Frankfurt.

He served a second term as Amir and Missionary In-charge in Nigeria from March 1983 to 1986. He writes that during this second term, after a tour by Hazrat Khalifatul Masih III (rh), a computer and a new printing machine were acquired, and the newspaper Truth began to appear in a considerably better format. The year of that tour is cut short in his writing and reads only "19"; the site does not supply it.

• Corroborated by: The independent Nigerian history lists "1983 to 1986" in its table of Amirs and states that in April 1986 he was reassigned to the international headquarters at Rabwah. source

Between 1968 and 1969 he divided the Agbede Circuit into four circuits: Agbede, Benin, Auchi and Agenebode.

A devotional nazm by him appeared in Al-Fazl on 30 September 1955, during his Jamia Ahmadiyya years.

His father was Master Imam Ali. Father and son are both treated in a local history of Bhera.

Mahmud Mujib Asghar records that his father, Mian Fazl-ur-Rahman Bismil, Amir Jamaat Ahmadiyya Bhera, was a senior colleague and friend of Master Imam Ali; that the two families grew closer when his daughter married into the Khawaja family in Germany; that during Maulana Anweri’s last ten to fifteen years he relied on him for matters relating to Rabwah; and that he wrote an article on him after his death which was published in the Ahmadiyya Gazette Canada.

Raja Zia-ud-Din Sahib was a teacher at the Talim-ul-Islam High School in Rabwah and the first president of the Dar-ul-Barakat quarter. He was the elder brother of Maulana Anweri’s brother-in-law Raja Bashir-ud-Din Ahmad Janjua, and the younger brother of Raja Rafi Ahmad Janjua, a teacher at the Talim-ul-Islam High School in Qadian. He showed Maulana Anweri great regard before his departure in 1956 and held a farewell meal for him. In 1974, returning from visiting prisoners held for the sake of Allah, he was shot by an assailant at Sargodha railway station. The bullet lodged in his brain and proved fatal.

He passed matriculation from the Government High School in Bhera in 1944 and entered the Talim-ul-Islam College that opened in Qadian the same year. He writes: "I was given Roll Number One. In this respect I can say that I am the first student of the Talim-ul-Islam College." Roll numbers in that first intake were allotted by marks obtained in the university examination. He was given Roll No. One a second time in the college's first degree class at Lahore, and notes that he does not know why, since his F.Sc. marks were by no means the highest: "it was a strange coincidence that, as in the Intermediate class, in the degree class too I had the honour of being the college's first student." He tells the Roll Number One story in Frankfurt against the retired mayor Dr Wilhelm Fay, whose car carried the number plate F AY 1, F being Frankfurt's letter, which is what prompted his reply.

After Partition the Talim-ul-Islam College was forced to move from Qadian to Pakistan along with the rest of the Community's institutions, and finding suitable premises for a college was a considerable problem. He took the first and second years of his B.Sc. at the Talim-ul-Islam College in Lahore, not at any government college.

His first period in West Germany ran from June 1964 to December 1967. He reached Frankfurt by way of Karachi on 20 June 1964. The German mission's central office was then in Hamburg, in the charge of Chaudhry Abdul Latif; the Imam of the Frankfurt mosque at that time was Chaudhry Mahmood Ahmad Cheema. After one night in Frankfurt he went on to Hamburg.

He returned from Germany to the centre at the beginning of 1977 and spent five continuous years in Pakistan. His first posting there, after earned leave, was as a worker in the office of the Private Secretary to Hazrat Khalifatul Masih III (rh), handling the correspondence reaching Huzoor from abroad. These letters were generally in English; he drafted the replies in his own hand, a typist typed them, and they were placed before Huzoor for review and signature. He records that he once asked Huzoor directly whether his English was found satisfactory, and was glad to receive an answer in the affirmative. During those days Huzoor gave him one of his own prayer mats, to the back of which he fixed a note recording that it had been given by Huzoor's own blessed hand.

In 1977, having reached the centre, he noticed that Hazrat Khalifatul Masih III (rh) returned again and again in his Friday sermons and addresses to the favour Allah had shown the Community in granting true dreams and visions, even to its children. He wrote to Huzoor asking leave to write a book on them. The reply came in Huzoor's hand the very next day: "Prepare the manuscript. Then we shall see whether it is printed or not." He first placed a notice in the daily Al-Fazl inviting anyone who had seen a true dream to send it to him. Close to two hundred and fifty dreams arrived, from over a hundred men and women, and he gathered further material from the Community's books, newspapers and periodicals until it had to be classified before it could be shaped into a book.

The work was published as Darweshan-e-Ahmadiyyat. In his own account, written at the time, six volumes had appeared under that title; he completed eight volumes in all, of which six were printed, with the true dreams recorded throughout them. Each volume runs to several hundred pages, and the third carries the title Hifazat-e-Samawi, Heavenly Protection, collecting accounts of miraculous deliverance. An introduction to the book by Mahmood Ahmad Malik appeared in Ansaruddin, the magazine of Majlis Ansarullah UK, in the issues of July to October 2013, and was reprinted in Al Fazl International, London, in July 2021. Al Fazl still cites the sixth volume as a source today. Al Fazl and Ansaruddin have continued to publish his work and to cite the series in the years since his death, most recently in 2025.

• Corroborated by: Al Fazl International, London, 4 July 2021. source
• Corroborated by: Al Fazl International, London, 10 October 2020. source

He came back to the markaz in 1977 and stayed five years. First a year as murabbi at Islamabad, then from 1979 to 1982 as Additional Nazir Islah-o-Irshad for Taleem-ul-Quran, and as Secretary of Hadiqatul Mubashireen, the central office that looked after the missionaries of the Jamaat. In 1988, the year he retired, he was appointed to Wakalat-e-Tasneef, the department of authorship.

Two days before his Punjab University physics examination he dreamt he was in the examination hall; the examiner ran short of question papers and began writing the questions on the blackboard for those who had none, and he was copying them down. He woke, and every question had gone from his mind except one: how would you determine the velocity of light by the method of Fizeau? The syllabus offered two methods for it. He had judged Fizeau's the harder, dropped it, and prepared the other. He spent a full day preparing Fizeau and told a classmate he believed the question would come. It was the first question on the paper. He answered it, and answered it correctly.

After his B.Sc. result he reached Rabwah in 1950 and reported his success to the Tahrik-e-Jadid office. The report was placed before Hazrat Khalifatul Masih II (ra), who wrote on it four words: "Enter the Jamia." He writes that his whole future was bound up with that single sentence. His time there ran five years rather than the usual four, because as a college graduate he still had to complete the first two classes, Ula and Thania; and after the fourth year he and four students who had come from Jamia Ahmadiyya Ahmad Nagar were required to take a further year of tibb. He graduated in 1956.

About a month before his B.Sc. result he dreamt he was at his home in Bhera, in Muhalla Haji Gulab, and a boy he seemed to know brought an English newspaper and told him the results were printed in it. They were listed by university roll number. He found his own, 1294, and the marks against it were 334. The figures were so clear that he could not believe they would prove exact, and he told nobody. Later, at home, his old schoolfellow Mahboob Ilahi Paracha arrived with an English newspaper, saying his own name was not in it but that Anweri should look. Against roll number 1294, in brackets, stood precisely the marks he had been shown a month earlier. He began praying nafl of thanksgiving at once; his mother came in and asked what prayer this was, and his elder sister Iqbal Begum explained.

As a student he dreamt that he was walking a narrow path, opening one small wooden gate after another, weeping without pain, certain that the Promised Messiah (as) stood at the end of it. Years later, when the material he had gathered turned out to be not one book but several, each with its own chapters, he understood what the gates had been.

After six months of effort night and day he could read a German book he had brought from the American Library, an account of Columbus's voyage to America, and understand about seventy-five per cent of it.

Italo Chiussi first walked into the Nur Mosque in Frankfurt on the evening of the day after Maulana Anweri arrived in Germany, the day he himself left for Hamburg, so the two did not meet. The date is fixed by the mosque guest book, in which Chiussi wrote his name, his address and one line in Italian meaning "Today I have seen this mosque."

After reading some chapters of the Qur'an with him, Chiussi said that he could now read a translation himself, since he had Qur'ans with translations in several languages, and that what he wanted, in order to gain a thorough mastery of the meanings, was to begin translating it into a language into which it had not been translated before.

• Corroborated by: The translation he began appeared as La Nobla Korano, Copenhagen 1969, volume 10 of the Oriento-Okcidento series. source

In Chiussi's own words, from Maulana Anweri's Urdu translation of his book: at the beginning of 1967 he spent three weeks at Bad König in the Odenwald and began the work of translation with the help of Arabic lexicons and of Italian, French and English translations of the Qur'an; the work produced in him such absorption that he had no strength left even to look at his surroundings; and during those weeks he also began, experimentally, to practise the Islamic prayer.

In about December 1966 Chiussi told Maulana Anweri that he wished to give up wine entirely from 1 January 1967, and asked for his help in a particular form: that Maulana Anweri should ask him from time to time whether he was keeping his covenant, because the fear of what he would have to answer would hold him to it. If he showed weakness and confessed it he would have broken his covenant, and if he concealed it he would have lied, and he hated lying. Maulana Anweri kept asking. Later, returning from a visit to Italy, Chiussi told him that once a hostess had pressed wine on him after a meal, that it had been brought specially for him, and that he had been on the point of taking a sip or two to keep her heart, "but I remembered you, and that if you asked me, what would I answer."

Maulana Anweri led Chiussi's funeral prayer with about fifteen friends in the open ground near the main gate of the Südfriedhof cemetery, which he writes as two words, "Süd Friedhof", with almost the whole Frankfurt community present. Dr Fabio Padoa, representing the company from its headquarters in Italy, read a written condolence which acknowledged his character and his service and noted specifically that in the last years of his life he had embraced Islam, and that his performance as head of the company had not altered in the slightest.

Before 1974 the young Pakistanis reaching Germany were staying lawfully on student visas, taking admission and paying fees at a private German school, which carried permission to work on a small scale, chiefly selling newspapers; and on Praktikant visas to learn a trade in a factory or a large hotel, which carried a wage below the normal rate and the rights of a regular worker, but required them to leave the country when the training ended.

Seeing the bloody anti-Ahmadi riots of 1974 in Pakistan, and having learned earlier, from the case of a Jordanian, that a person who stated that his life or honour was in danger in his own country and that his government was not protecting him would be granted a visa in Germany, Maulana Anweri took legal advice and wrote to friends in Pakistan that a way had opened. He notes that he was glad the community was being built, and at the same time afraid that it might land the community in Pakistan in further difficulty, and that when he consulted his fellow missionaries in Europe he got no encouraging answer.

When he learned that some people who were not Ahmadis had begun declaring themselves Ahmadi in order to obtain visas, Maulana Anweri wrote on his own initiative to the Interior Minister of West Germany, stating that persons who were not members of the community were obtaining improper advantages, proposing that the mission would in future issue a certificate confirming membership, and that anyone without one should have his case treated as doubtful and verified with the mission. He enclosed a specimen. The Interior Minister acted at once and had copies circulated to police stations throughout Germany, after which the police asked for the certificate wherever anyone applied for refuge as an Ahmadi.

He reduced his own visits to the police office so that the police should not form the impression that the Imam of the Ahmadiyya mosque was calling people over, but he did not disown what he had begun: "this was a thing plain and open, which I could not deny, that the beginning of this whole affair was from my own hand."

While this was going on, and with a hostile propaganda campaign running against the community inside Pakistan, Maulana Anweri began receiving threats from anonymous persons by telephone and by letter, saying that they would finish him and kill him.

Police came to the Frankfurt mission house with a list of names of Ahmadi asylum applicants, two officers taking position at the outer gate and two coming into the office. The name written at the bottom of the list had given its address as the Pakistani Embassy at Bonn. The first name on the list was Mirza Mahmood Ahmad, and a friend of exactly that name, ten years resident in Germany and employed by the American Army, happened to be sitting in the room that morning, having come to the mosque instead of going to work; his passport carried an unlimited residence visa. The officers added that they had telephoned the Pakistani Embassy and that no person of that name worked there, and they did not think it necessary to investigate any of the other names. Maulana Anweri learned afterwards that a second, different man of the same name was indeed among the new arrivals. The memoir says only that the person named at the foot of the list gave the embassy as his address; it does not state that the embassy was responsible.

Ending his first German term in 1967 he dreamed that he was standing in what seemed the courtyard of a house with a broken wall around it, and felt that the courtyard was the country of Germany; and that a jujube tree there looked entirely dry, yet had clumps of green leaves sprouting here and there on its dry twigs. He read the first part as meaning he would one day be Amir and Missionary In-charge of all West Germany, which happened in 1972. When communities began forming outside Frankfurt after 1974 the second part came back to him, he looked up the interpretation of jujube leaves, and found that they signify righteous people. From then on he deliberately began sending new arrivals to new places.

Where a single member was living alone in a town, he would tell him: "consider yourself a whole Jamaat." Once one man was settled somewhere he would help settle others there.

During the visit of Khalifatul Masih III (rh) in August 1973, when the press asked him to go into the mosque to be photographed, he pointed at it and said with feeling: "This mosque will not remain empty for long." Maulana Anweri records that this was said at a time when there was not yet any thought of Pakistani Ahmadis coming to Germany.

At the Nur Mosque during the first tour of West Germany by Khalifatul Masih III (rh), 8 to 10 July 1967, he related a dream in which he was in a hall that seemed to be a museum, where Hitler was also present and said, come, let me show you my museum; and he saw there a stone in the shape of a heart with writing on it, and coming closer read the kalima. He interpreted it as meaning that although the German nation appears hard-hearted on the surface, the capacity to accept Islam is present in their hearts. Maulana Anweri wrote the dream down in his own words, showed it to him, and sent it for publication; it appeared in the daily Al Fazl, Rabwah, on 10 August 1967. The tour itself was in July; 10 August 1967 is the date of the Al Fazl issue in which the dream was published, not of the visit. The Frankfurter Neue Presse of 25 August 1973, reporting a later press conference at the mosque, dated the dream to 1945, immediately after the Second World War.

He asked Malik Shah Din Awan, an electrical engineer of the community living at Königswinter near Bonn, whether a device could be made that would switch a tape-recorded azan on and off automatically at the prayer times. It was built, and came with a board on which the names of the five prayers were written, wired so that the plate for that prayer lit up as the recording began. Before using it Maulana Anweri consulted the community's Mufti on whether giving the azan by tape recorder was permissible, and was told that there was no harm in it, but that giving the azan is itself an act of worship. So a notice was put up in the mosque asking that as soon as the recorded azan sounded, one of those present should stand and give the azan himself.

It had long been his wish that the mosque should have a kalima board that could be lit. When members began arriving from Pakistan after 1974 and contributions increased, he had rates taken from several firms and chose one that would make the board and hang it for two thousand marks. It remains above the green door of the Nur Mosque, and when lit the words show on a green ground.

For members living far from Frankfurt he started an Urdu news-sheet called Akhbar-e-Ahmadiyya, to carry community news and especially the news from Pakistan, and so to turn readers to prayer. Its editing, production and distribution were all done by one man, Maulvi Mansoor Ahmad Umar, who was also Naib Imam at Frankfurt and had many other duties. When he was recalled to the centre in the middle of 1975 the paper had to close, because no one else could be found who could do the calligraphy.

At the request of Dr Sheraz Mistry, an Indian Muslim whose daughter attended the school, Maulana Anweri prepared cyclostyled lessons in German, three or four pages long, and taught them twice a week at the high school in Ober-Ramstadt near Darmstadt, where all the Muslim children in the school were gathered into one room whatever class they were in. The lessons covered the meaning of the greeting and who should give it first, the meanings of Bismillah and Alhamdulillah and when to say them, the manners of sneezing and the replies, and the prayers before sleeping, on waking and after eating, each written in Arabic with its meaning beside it. The lessons ran two or three months, and were afterwards taught to a group of Yugoslav children in Frankfurt, ending in an examination with prizes. Maulana Anweri notes that at that time there was no Ahmadi child in Frankfurt or anywhere near it; the lessons were posted to two families at Marktbreit, and of the children who sat the examination exactly one was an Ahmadi.

Maulana Anweri approached the director of the history and linguistics department of Frankfurt University and asked whether it would host a lecture by a man who had been President of the United Nations General Assembly and President of the International Court of Justice. The department agreed, and Chaudhry Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, then living in London, came and lectured in English. Maulana Anweri was disappointed by the turnout; Zafrulla Khan told him that the number of listeners was a very reasonable one by European standards.

• Corroborated by: Zafrulla Khan was President of the United Nations General Assembly for its seventeenth session, 1962-63. source
• Corroborated by: He was a judge of the International Court of Justice from 1954 and its President only from 1970 to 1973, after the German term in which the memoir places this lecture. source

Chiussi wrote his account of his journeys to Mecca, Medina, Qadian and Rabwah in German as Das Haus in Mekka. Maulana Anweri sent two thousand marks to have it printed in Pakistan at a press that held the four special German characters, on the express condition that proofs be sent to him and nothing printed until he gave the order. It was printed without his order and arrived full of typesetting errors, and he records plainly that the book was not, and is not, fit to be put into a German reader's hand. He translated it into Urdu during Chiussi's lifetime, and Chaudhry Muhammad Zafrulla Khan wrote the preface to that translation, paying tribute to Chiussi and writing of Maulana Anweri that by translating the book into Urdu he had done a great service to Urdu readers. A new Ahmadi, Dr Iftikhar Ahmad Khan, telephoned Maulana Anweri after reading it, moved by it, and raised his monthly contribution from fifty marks to a hundred.

His first book, written in English during his years in Ghana in the form of a dialogue between a Muslim and a Christian, was later published under the auspices of Jamia Ahmadiyya, Rabwah. Chiussi liked it so much that he translated it into German entirely of his own accord, under the title Ein Gespräch zwischen ein Muslim und Christ, which is the form Maulana Anweri writes. A German Christian priest, Herr Weber, raised objections to the book; Maulana Anweri answered him in writing and records that no reply ever came.

He wrote a book in German on what the Qur'an says of outer space and interplanetary flight. He gives its title as Quran über den Weltraum und Interplanetarische Flüge.

• Corroborated by: Announced on 8 July 2016 as a new brochure, "Der Heilige Qur'an über den Weltraum & interplanetarische Flüge", author Fazal Ilahi Anweri, an official German Ahmadiyya publication, issued in 2016, the year before he died. source

The address of welcome to Khalifatul Masih III (rh) on his first tour of West Germany, 8 to 10 July 1967, was read by Mahmood Ismail Czölsch, a young German who had accepted Islam. Maulana Anweri writes the surname two ways, Czölsch and once Czölch.

When bound copies of the second edition of the German Qur'an reached Frankfurt in 1972 the binding, the trimming and the cover were all poor. Firms in Frankfurt that had regularly asked for supplies refused to take it, and one German customer returned a copy listing eighteen defects. Maulana Anweri wrote that these were faults not even counted as faults in Pakistan but had become normal there, and that he recorded the detail because the standard of printing in Europe is so high that defects of that kind are not tolerated.

Lajna Imaillah was established in Germany in 1973, and its first appointed president was Qanita, a Swedish woman who had accepted Islam at the hand of Khalifatul Masih III (rh) at the opening of Denmark's first mosque in Copenhagen in 1967. With the arrival of many women after 1974 the organisation was set up afresh.

The first annual three-day Khuddam ijtema in Germany was held at the Nur Mosque, Frankfurt, from 9 to 11 June 1973, before the arrivals from Pakistan began. The municipality gave its ground and washrooms free of charge for a full day and posted one of its own workers to remain on the field in case anything was needed.

A young German, Mr Hilse of Nuremberg, came to Maulana Anweri saying he wished to become a Muslim. He explained that he had fallen ill with a disease of the stomach, that the doctors had given him a twenty-five per cent hope of surviving the operation, and that he had made a covenant with God that if he were given his life he would accept Islam. The operation succeeded, but three quarters of his stomach was removed, so that he had to eat frequently. Maulana Anweri told him that in God's sight he had already become a Muslim, but asked him to wait, as the Khalifa was coming; and he took his pledge at the hand of Khalifatul Masih III (rh) during the first tour of West Germany, 8 to 10 July 1967.

At a gathering in Bremen at the house of Dr Suhendar, an Indonesian Ahmadi and the only Ahmadi living in that city, a Christian pastor and a German woman who was an atheist by conviction were also present. When the woman asked the pastor what his greatest argument for the existence of God was, he answered that as children know their father is home when they find his car in the garage, so the heavens and earth and moon and stars tell us their Creator exists. Maulana Anweri, who had been silent till then, said: "Quite right. But that God died two thousand years ago." Asked how, he answered: because for two thousand years He has not spoken to anybody. If a room is shut from inside, everyone assumes someone is within; but if nobody answers even loud knocking, it must be understood either that the door shut by accident or that the one who shut it has died. He then said that Christians hold the Creator to have been silent for two thousand years, while Muslims hold that He speaks now as He spoke before.

Listing the standing objections he was asked in Germany about polygamy, tolerance and prayer in Arabic, Maulana Anweri added of his own accord: "and on top of all that there is the shameful practical example of the Muslims themselves, which has put ugly stains all over the beautiful face of Islam."

He was posted to The Gambia as Amir and Missionary In-charge from July 1982. He describes the telegram from the centre that recalled him, after nine or ten months there, to take charge in Nigeria.

Throughout Maulana Anweri's second German term, Hadayatullah Hübsch suffered episodes of an illness whose cause was never established. Maulana Anweri writes that he would suddenly fall silent, that a frightening brightness came into his eyes and an unusual excitement into his voice. He records that they were told of a hospital at Hadamar which held the record of his earlier treatment, that they obtained his mother's agreement before taking him, and that on the Autobahn he came to himself and asked where they were being taken, so that they stopped at the nearest rest house rather than risk an accident; the police telephoned his mother, satisfied themselves, and said he could not travel further in that condition, against which Hübsch protested vigorously in his classical German. Maulana Anweri records that his first wife, Hidayat Begum, was afflicted in the same way, and that both of them suffered these episodes repeatedly up to his own departure for Pakistan in 1977. He also records that Hübsch's later wife, Sadiqa, is from Qadian and that they have seven children, and that Atiyyat-un-Nur, the eldest, is the daughter of the first marriage. The published German record gives 1946 as his year of birth, 1969 as the year he accepted Islam and 2011 as the year of his death, which agrees with the memoir's account that he was already a member of the community when Maulana Anweri returned to Germany in September 1972.

• Corroborated by: Hadayatullah Hübsch (1946-2011), German writer and Imam of the Nur Mosque in Frankfurt; accepted Islam in 1969. source

When Egyptian forces occupied the Gulf of Aqaba in 1967 and Israel drove them out of Sinai, and the Arab states cut off oil supplies to Europe in retaliation, Maulana Anweri wrote an article entitled Middle East Conflict in the Light of Heavenly Prophecies, published in German as Der Mittelostkonflikt im Lichte Himmlischer Prophezeiungen. He argued from what he called the divine writings that Israel would at some point incline towards Russia; that Europe was shortly to face a world war whose centre would be the Middle East; and that at that time the prophecy would be fulfilled of a war between Muslims and Jews in which the Jews would be killed. Hadayatullah Hübsch proof-read it and dealt with the printer, and the cost was shared by arrangement with Chaudhry Mushtaq Ahmad Bajwa.

Muhammad Amin Bargull, a German, came occasionally to the mission during Maulana Anweri's first term, and Maulana Anweri writes that they doubted his sincerity even then, because he learned that Bargull went also to non-Ahmadis on the Eids and presented himself there as a very sincere Muslim. After Maulana Anweri returned to Pakistan, Bargull and his successor made the arrangement that placed five or six Pakistani Ahmadis in a factory. Bargull told them they need not buy food for themselves, since his daughter worked in a grocery shop and he would obtain everything cheaply through her. The matter that most disturbed Maulana Anweri on his return in 1972 was that the entire wage of one man's younger brother was drawn out by Bargull himself as soon as it was paid into the bank, on the pretext that the young man wasted his money and should deposit it with him; and that because Bargull had held out to the elder brother the prospect of becoming his son-in-law, the family trusted him, so that two or three years of wages had passed to him. Maulana Anweri withholds the younger brother's own name, he says, for reasons of prudence.

Khalifatul Masih III (rh) spoke repeatedly, in Maulana Anweri's presence, about a date for Germany. In his address at Frankfurt in 1967 he said that before the fourth great world revolution the world would see a specimen of the Day of Judgement, as a result of which the structure of the present European civilisation would be completely destroyed. Relating his dream of the heart-shaped stone in the same period, he said that Islam would begin to spread in Germany within thirty years, that the process would continue a further twenty, and that the whole of Germany would come into the lap of Islam. At the Frankfurt press conference of August 1973 he said that the capacity to accept Islam was present in the hearts of the German nation and that he was certain the nation would accept Islam within the next fifty years. At the Römer in 1976 he said that as far as he could see the nation stood ready to accept Islam and that the time was near when the majority of them would accept it.

Speaking to the young men who had reached Germany, Maulana Anweri says he told them constantly that their example compared with the Pakistani people was that of a flock of sheep going under the watch of its shepherd, without fear or danger, while the example of the other Pakistanis was of a flock wandering in the forest with no owner or keeper, which might at any moment fall prey to a wild animal or be scattered; and that however happy and contented those others might appear on the surface, there was present in their hearts a longing which they had neither the strength nor the inclination to fulfil. He notes that this was most often the subject of his speeches at the community's gatherings.

Asked by an Ahmadi sister at Marktbreit to deal with two Jehovah's Witness preachers who were visiting her children, Maulana Anweri opened not on Jesus but on the character of the earlier prophets as the Bible describes them, asking whether these were the morals they had come to teach. He then asked them to read Matthew chapter 24 verse 7, and argued that because the Promised Messiah (as) had cited Matthew for pestilence as one of the three great signs of the second advent, later printings had removed the word from Matthew while leaving it standing in Luke, adding that if the sense of pestilence were contained in earthquakes there would have been no reason to write it separately. When the second man turned pages and offered something, he said that he wished to see the word in Matthew, not in Luke.

Maulana Anweri sets out the objections regularly put to him in Germany and how he answered them. On pork, asked by a child why Muslims do not eat it, he answered that the Qur'an forbids it, and that the child should ask his teacher why Christians eat it when the Bible declares it forbidden; asked the same by a church group, he answered that the Qur'an did not declare the pig forbidden, the Bible did, and the Qur'an confirmed the Bible's command, adding that the pig appears to be singled out because its habits are held objectionable from a moral point of view, and that since food affects a man's spiritual faculties its meat was forbidden lest those weaknesses take root in him. On the virgin birth he answered that Jesus, though born without a father, was according to the Bible a man who called himself the Son of Man, and that if birth without a father were a ground of superiority then one born without either parent would be superior still. On the veil he held that Islam presents a social structure in which free mixing of men and women has no place, and that the covering called the niqab or burqa is an exception within the rule of purdah rather than the rule itself, adding that Muslims themselves had brought it into disrepute by misusing it or going to excess in it. On drink he argued that Islam's prohibition begins a long way back while Europe's begins only where the water has begun to leap over the banks, and asked whether it is better to stop the flood inside the river or to build embankments once it has overflowed. He also lists the standing objections he was given: that Islam opened a door of self-indulgence by permitting a plurality of wives; that whatever the wisdom of polygamy there was no justification for concubinage; that Muhammad was exempted from the limit; that Islam has no tolerance for another's religion; and that requiring prayer in Arabic made a pillar of the faith difficult for non-Arabs.

Invited with Haider Ali Zafar to a Hamburg gathering held by an organisation of American Sikhs, The Sikh Organisation of the Western Hemisphere, in honour of their leader, to which the city's Christian and semi-religious bodies had all accepted invitations, Maulana Anweri hesitated at being asked to speak on Islam for five or six minutes before an audience that knew little of it beyond the belief that it had spread by the sword. They were received by American Sikhs in white Punjabi dress, and the chairman was announced as His Holiness. Every speaker who rose addressed him as Your Holiness; Maulana Anweri addressed him as Mr Chairman and finished his seven-minute speech in seven minutes. He records that the chairman's own forty-five-minute address in English opened with the sentence that he too considered himself holy, because there were nine holes in his body, and that had the guests' introductory speeches not made the gathering so earnest a great laugh would have gone up at it. He regretted that no time had been kept for questions, since he would have asked on what the chairman's beliefs were founded.

At the Nur Mosque during the first tour of West Germany by Khalifatul Masih III (rh), 8 to 10 July 1967, the talk turned to the single spoonful of honey put into his tea, since he kept a strict diet on account of diabetes. Smiling, he said: whenever I eat one spoonful of honey the thought comes to me that I ought to say Alhamdulillah two thousand times, because before that little food came onto my table two thousand labourers laboured night and day to prepare it.

On the first day of that visit, going in after the day's engagements, Khalifatul Masih III (rh) asked Maulana Anweri at what time he prayed Fajr. In a German July the sun rises about a quarter to four, so the time comes in at two or half past two. Maulana Anweri answered that sunrise was about four o'clock and that the prayer would be said whenever Huzoor instructed. Reading his drift, Huzoor said with a smile that moving the sun backwards or forwards was not in their power, and told him to wake him at half past two. They prayed Fajr behind him the next morning at about three.

The first halqa in Germany was formed at Offenbach, where eight or ten members lived near one another. After a recitation and a short talk on the need for organisation, three officers were elected and pledges for Tahrik-e-Jadid were written down on the spot. Afterwards one of those present reported what the non-Ahmadi friends sitting in the room had said: that their own maulvis made speeches until their throats tore, put people on oath by God and the Prophet and piled up heaven and hell together before getting two rupees out of anyone's pocket, whereas this Imam said two words and every man present wrote down fifty and a hundred marks, several paying cash. "We told them: you do not know what we are."

For the opening of Sweden's first mosque at Gothenburg in 1976 a coach was hired at ninety marks a head return, against a rail fare of over three hundred. Because almost all the travellers held asylum visas, permission to leave and re-enter had to be obtained from Mr Beiss of the Frankfurt foreigners' department, to whom Maulana Anweri put the magazine Der Islam recording Ahmadi houses burned, and a press photograph of a house being set alight with two policemen standing behind it smiling, asking whether police stand and watch a house burn. Visas were arranged through the Swedish consulate, Maulana Anweri offering to pay the telex costs himself. They prayed Zuhr and Asr in an open field on the way and crossed at Helsingborg. Told at a station restaurant that breakfast cost twelve kronor, he walked round and found four eggs, six pieces of bread and three pats of butter on every plate, with biscuits, rusks and yoghurt besides, and everyone had some remark to make on paying. As the coach pulled away at the end, Khalifatul Masih III (rh) stood in front of the mosque waving them off.

At the high school in Kelkheim the religious education teacher, a priest, invited Maulana Anweri to speak on Islam and Christianity to a class of fifteen to eighteen year olds. He argued that Islam has the Bible's endorsement, citing the prophecy of a prophet like Moses, the birth in Arabia, the ten thousand saints, and the Gospel passages on the Spirit of truth and the prince of the world, and the Qur'anic verses calling the Torah a book of guidance and light. He writes that his answers, and the priest's comments on them, produced an atmosphere in which the students themselves began speaking in his support. At the end the priest thanked him, but when Maulana Anweri asked when he should come again, said only that he would let him know. No further invitation came, although in introducing him the priest had said that they wished such gatherings to continue.

After his Frankfurt University lecture, Chaudhry Muhammad Zafrulla Khan sat among the members. When one of them excused himself for a pressing engagement and asked for special prayers, Zafrulla Khan smiled and said the same thing happened to him as to the mirasi's wife: a mirasi came home tired, told his wife to hold the calf while he milked the buffalo, then set the vessel aside and fell asleep the moment he lay down, and when he woke in the morning found her still sitting there holding the calf. Asked why, she said that he had never told her to let it go. "In just this way I go on praying. People's work gets done, and they do not even inform me."

A man presenting himself as an Egyptian journalist stayed the night at the mission and borrowed thirty marks, which Maulana Anweri writes they lent thinking he was an Arab Muslim brother. He returned much later saying he had left an article with Radio Hessen which would earn four hundred marks, that he had given them Maulana Anweri's name and address for the payment, and then, unable to find his ticket, asked for a hundred and twenty marks against that sum. At the mention of the police he gathered his bag and left. Maulana Anweri went to Radio Hessen the next day, obtained the article, and found that not one sentence of its English was correct, telephoning to ask what he was supposed to read.

Asked by a young Pakistani he had never met to hold something arriving from Pakistan, Maulana Anweri was telephoned by a woman first from the airport and then from a Frankfurt hotel. He drove there with Mirza Mansoor Ahmad. As he entered the hotel hall and saw a woman in Pakistani dress at the reception counter, he heard the word "hasheesh" and, believing his companion had spoken it, turned and walked out; Mirza Mansoor said he had said no such thing. Maulana Anweri concluded it was a large hashish operation, noting that he had once been called by a Frankfurt judge to interpret for two Pakistanis caught bringing hashish at the airport, and that had he gone up to the room and come out again he would have been suspected of complicity, whereas leaving without meeting her, to which the hotel staff were witnesses, was his proof. He writes that he never discovered who spoke the word, and that Mirza Mansoor remained astonished by it. He reprimanded the young man severely when he next appeared.

During the third German visit of Khalifatul Masih III (rh) in 1976, Maulana Anweri took him to the Römer with two members of the German community, Mubashir Ahmad Bajwa and Waseem Ahmad Chaudhry. The Chief Mayor, Martin Berg, received him with two members of his council and took him first into the Kaisersaal, where the life-size portraits of the German emperors hang. Berg presented an album of historic Frankfurt and was given a German translation of the Qur'an. The meeting was photographed and reported in the Frankfurter Abend Post of 8 September 1976.

A manuscript on the basic teachings of Islam by Masood Ahmad Jhelmi was translated into German by Hadayatullah Hübsch, who typed the whole of it onto stencils himself. Under Maulana Anweri's supervision other members ran off five hundred foolscap copies from the stencils, and the cover was printed. The German translation was first published by the mission under the title Die Gnade Allahs, which Maulana Anweri renders in Urdu as فضل باری تعالیٰ, "the grace of Allah the Exalted", and the cyclostyled run of five hundred copies was issued under that first title; it only later appeared in proper book form as Islam - Idee und Praxis.

Maulana Anweri worked to place the community's books in German university libraries, travelling to Bonn, Cologne and Mainz besides Frankfurt to take orders for the five-volume English commentary on the Qur'an. He records that the director of the oriental department at Bonn dismissed it until Maulana Anweri asked him to look up a verse in his own commentary and then read the same verse in the volume he had brought, after which he went on reading for a long time.

Books were laid out on a table in the mission hall, each with its price on a small plastic stand, and payment was left to the buyer. Maulana Anweri records that whenever the box was opened it held something like a hundred and fifty to two hundred marks. Because the street door had to be kept shut so that visitors would not enter with shoes on, he put a large board on the road so that the mosque should not appear closed and deserted.

Having judged that as far as preaching was concerned the work had to be found rather than waited for, he wrote to schools and institutions offering to receive any group that wished to learn about Islam. Visitors were shown a large photograph of the pilgrims circling the Ka'ba and a wall map eight feet by four, built up over several days, on which every mosque and mission centre then established in the world was picked out with small electric bulbs.

A Protestant pastor telephoned, offered to pay his fare both ways, and invited him to lecture on Islam in his church. Introducing him, the pastor said that they had declared that day the Day of Islam, and that in keeping with it he would begin with the book of Islam, the Holy Qur'an. Afterwards the pastor introduced his wife and children and kept Maulana Anweri overnight as his guest, and accepted an invitation to come to Frankfurt to meet the Khalifa.

The mission took a stall at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Deutsche Welle recorded an interview with Maulana Anweri in Urdu and broadcast it the following day; they could not hear it themselves, but Sahibzada Mirza Waseem Ahmad, Amir of the community at Qadian, visiting Frankfurt that year on a European tour, told him he had heard it in Qadian. Of the fair Maulana Anweri wrote that the Arab countries' stalls promoted their culture rather than Islam, and only in Arabic, so that a visitor from another world coming down into the hall would conclude, unless he happened by mistake on their stall, that a small religion called Islam also existed on the earth.

Maulana Anweri records that after travelling to the Jalsa Salana at Rabwah, Hadayatullah Hübsch wrote up his impressions of the centre of the community in book form. He gives its German title as "Die Stadt der glücklichen Tränen", "The City of Happy Tears". Maulana Anweri also gives the book an Urdu title of his own, خوش نصیب آنسوؤں کی بستی, which he renders as "the settlement of fortunate tears", and records that it was published as a pocket-sized book. He describes the journey to Rabwah and the book that came out of it. The published book is "Zur Stadt der glücklichen Tränen: Reiseberichte", edited by Hadayatullah Hübsch and published in 1994. The memoir names Hübsch as author; the published volume appeared in 1994 with Hübsch as editor.

• Corroborated by: Hadayatullah Hübsch (1946-2011), German record of his life and publications. source
• Corroborated by: Zur Stadt der glücklichen Tränen: Reiseberichte, edited by Hadayatullah Hübsch, published in 1994. source

Chiussi's Esperanto translation of the Qur'an was published as "La Nobla Korano" in Copenhagen in 1969, with the Arabic text in parallel columns, as volume 10 of the series Oriento-Okcidento, issued under the auspices of the Universal Esperanto Association; a second edition followed in 1970. Before publication the draft was proofread by an Egyptian Esperantist, Nasif Ishaq.

• Corroborated by: Quran translation of the week: the Esperanto Qur'an of Italo Chiussi. source
• Corroborated by: Catalogue record for La Nobla Korano. source

Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan wrote the introduction to Chiussi's Esperanto Qur'an while serving as a judge of the International Court of Justice. This independently confirms the friendship the memoir describes between the two men, and strengthens the memoir's separate record that Zafrulla Khan also wrote the preface to Maulana Anweri's Urdu translation of Chiussi's travel book.

• Corroborated by: Quran translation of the week: the Esperanto Qur'an of Italo Chiussi, with Zafrulla Khan's introduction. source

Chiussi came from Trieste and had grown up in a devout Catholic family. He took a doctorate in mathematics at Pisa and ran the German business of an Italian insurer.

• Corroborated by: Biographical account of Italo Chiussi. source
• Corroborated by: Catalogue record for La Nobla Korano. source

The published record states that Chiussi met Khalifatul Masih III (rh) in 1967, told him during that conversation that he was translating the Qur'an into Esperanto, and accepted Islam and joined the community two years later, in 1969. The memoir supplies what an outside source could not know: that he had already recited the kalima privately before Maulana Anweri, in secret from the rest of the community, before Maulana Anweri left Germany in 1967, and took bai'at publicly afterwards before his successor. The two records agree, the memoir giving the private stage and the published record the public one. "LIFE HISTORY" has Chiussi telling Maulana Anweri of his bai'at at Frankfurt airport in September 1972, while "My Two Terms in Germany" says the news reached him by letter while he was still in Nigeria. The external date of 1969 supports the German memoir, since Maulana Anweri was in Nigeria from 1968 to 1972.

• Corroborated by: Italo Chiussi met Khalifatul Masih III (rh) in 1967 and joined the Ahmadiyya community in 1969. source

Chiussi died on 8 June 1973 of cancer of the stomach. He had performed the Hajj in December 1972 while already ill and undiagnosed.

In his last days Chiussi compiled a collection of hadith on the morals and manners of the Holy Prophet (sa), translated it into Esperanto and sent it to the firm that had printed the Qur'an. Despite his utmost efforts it could not be published in his lifetime, but after his death the same firm published it under the name he had himself proposed: Je la Flanko de la Profeto, Italo Chiussi. Maulana Anweri gives the imprint as Kehlet, Heideweg 20, B-2120 Schoten, ISBN 90 6336 0037. He calls the firm Danish while giving a Belgian address, and that is left as he wrote it.

• Corroborated by: It is volume 12 of the Oriento-Okcidento series and the only book in that series originally written in Esperanto rather than translated. source

In June 1993, twenty years after his death, the lease on Chiussi's grave was due to expire and his widow was unsure she could meet the cost of extending it. Maulana Anweri put it to the community, and the Jamaat took over the rights to the grave and extended it for a further twenty years. His daughter is named Barbara; his son Stefano was taking a specialist course in laser after university.

He crossed the border into Austria on the night of 25 December 1988, reaching Linz, then Munich, then Frankfurt. Schwalbach followed, from January 1989 to May 1989.

He retired on 16 March 1998. The "1968" printed in the short history is a typing error for 1998.

Maulana Anweri records that in the Republic of Benin, formerly Dahomey, whose central mosque stood at Porto Novo, the community grew so fast that about seventy local kings accepted Ahmadiyyat, jamaats were established at 274 places, and of 283 mosques the community had itself built 29, making 312 mosques in the country. He connects this to a revelation to the Founder recorded in Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya: "He shall bless thee greatly, so much so that kings shall seek blessings from thy garments." He describes fifty local chiefs riding in ceremonial dress at the annual gathering of 2002, led by the King of Paraku, before a gathering of fifty thousand.

The first Jalsa Salana in Germany was held on Sunday 28 December 1975, from 10am to 6pm, in the Fazl-e-Omar Mosque, Hamburg. Both the opening and the closing sessions were chaired by Maulana Fazal Ilahi Anweri, then Amir and Missionary In-charge of Germany. A list of attendees survives naming 63 people, from Denmark, Frankfurt and other cities; including organisers the total was about 70. Six speeches were delivered, one of them by Al-Haj Nuh Sven Hansen of Denmark. The second Jalsa Salana Germany followed on 8 January 1977, again at the Fazl-e-Omar Mosque, having been intended for December 1976.

• Corroborated by: The official history of the Jalsa Salana in Germany by Muhammad Ilyas Munir, missionary and chairman of the committee for the history of the Ahmadiyya in Germany (Revue der Religionen, Teil I). source
• Corroborated by: Al Hakam: "History of Germany Jalsa". source

The 50th Jalsa Salana Germany takes place from 4 to 6 September 2026 at Flugplatz Mendig, with around 45,000 attendees expected. The community's own framing of the anniversary is the growth "from about 70 participants in 1975 to tens of thousands today." The 1975 gathering of about seventy people is the one Maulana Anweri chaired.

• Corroborated by: Süddeutsche Zeitung (dpa): "Tausende Muslime feiern 50 Jahre Zusammenhalt". source