Inside the Surrey Caliphate

For much of the evening, the Caliph sat quietly at the high table, his head bowed, breaking pose only when it was time to deliver his speech. Even then he was subdued.

“Is there any benefit to holding this event?” he asked the 600 seated guests of his Surrey Kingdom. Hundreds of thousands more were watching on TVs in Lahore, Lagos and beyond.

When he launched the first Peace Symposium in 2004, Hazrat Mirza Masroor had been the Fifth Caliph of the Ahmadiyya for little more than a year. Then, American forces were battling through Fallujah and he believed that religious leaders possessed a moral authority that could steer the world away from catastrophe.

Two decades later, that Armageddon appears to be edging closer. The past year has seen American Tomahawk missiles rain down on Iran, a new Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and a famine unfold in Sudan. On the very day of this year's symposium, Tommy Robinson was addressing supporters 35 miles away in central London, urging them to prepare for what he called “the battle of Britain”.

“The Pope and others are now acknowledging what I have long warned about,” the Caliph told his audience. “A world war has already begun, and piece by piece the world is sleepwalking ever deeper into its grip.”

This year's symposium was the first to be held in Islamabad, the Ahmadiyya community's 33-acre headquarters near Tilford that was founded by the Caliph's predecessor on a Surrey spur more than four decades ago. Previously, they had been held in the Baitul Futuh Mosque, in south London. The drive to Islamabad from Farnham station takes barely ten minutes, winding through a corridor of rural England. It carries you across the River Wey, past the ruins of Waverley Abbey, and into Bourne Woods, where Ridley Scott filmed the opening cavalry charge of Gladiator.

For the headquarters of a global religious movement with around 20 million followers, Islamabad is strikingly modest. Its eight blocks of red-brick terraced housing, home to more than 100 permanent residents, could easily be mistaken for a suburb of Milton Keynes. Mansoor Hall, where the symposium took place, resembles a sports centre. Even the Mubarak Mosque seems designed not to draw attention to itself. At just 13 metres high, its roof is coloured to blend into the treeline.

In fact, the only telling signs Islamabad is no normal Surrey village are the two types of hats donned by its residents. Most men wear the black Pakol cap favoured across the movement. Imams and community elders wear the taller, rimless Topi. The white turban is strictly reserved for the Caliph, the headscarf worn by his great-grandfather and founder of the movement: Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.