Ahmadiyya in Indonesia

Ahmadiyya (Indonesian: Ahmadiyah) is an Islamic movement in Indonesia. The earliest history of the Community in Indonesia dates back to the early days of the Second Caliph, when during the summer of 1925, roughly two decades prior to the Indonesian revolution, a missionary of the Community, Rahmat Ali, stepped on Indonesia's largest island, Sumatra, and established the movement with 13 devotees in Tapaktuan, in the province of Aceh. The Community has an influential history in Indonesia's religious development, yet in the modern times it has faced increasing intolerance from religious establishments in the country and physical hostilities from radical Muslim groups. The Association of Religion Data Archives estimates around 400,000 Ahmadi Muslims, spread over 542 branches across the country.

The history of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Indonesia begins in 1925, during the era of Dutch colonization of the Indonesian archipelago, approximately two decades prior to the Indonesian Revolution. However, contact with the Indonesian people and Ahmadi Muslims of India dates back a few years earlier. In 1922, in order to further their religious studies, three Indonesian students, Abubakar Ayyub, Ahmad Nuruddin and Zaini Dahlan, from Sumatra Tawalib, a boarding school in Sumatra, initially planned to travel to Islamic institutions in Egypt, which during that period were known for their reputation in the Muslim world. However, their teachers advised them to travel to India, which according to them was increasingly becoming a center of Islamic thought. It has been suggested that a number of Ahmadi Muslim journals and books published in India were widely circulated in South East Asian countries of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, in the 1920s. Moreover, on October 1920, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, the leader of the splinter group Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement toured Southeast Asia where he successfully managed to win confidence among some Indonesian Muslims. He delivered a number of speeches in Surabaya and Batavia which attracted headlines in several leading newspapers. It has been postulated that this may have been the trigger for the teachers to recommend a trip to India.

...
Wikipedia