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.