This video talks about the saga of the convert numbers published by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Here are my comments, specifically in response to user PeaceOverHate:
My Response
I’d say the numbers at Jalsa Salana are very telling.
Certainly, only a fraction of the Jama’at ever makes it out to the Jalsa. However, why would the proportion of Ahmadis attending Jalsa in their country go down relative to the larger number of converts claimed?
Wouldn’t the first few years after those converts came in, show us a disproportionate rise in attendance, from the sheer excitement of being a new Ahmadi Muslim?
Let’s do the math. Let’s say that in Canada, there are 30,000 Ahmadi Muslims. Let’s also say that on average, Jalsa Salana Canada gets approximately 5,000 Ahmadi Muslims in attendance. From this hypothetical, we can say that roughly 1 in 6 Ahmadi Muslims in Canada, attends Jalsa Salana Canada in any given year.
If a few years later, it was claimed that 70,000 people had since joined Ahmadiyyat in Canada alone since previously stable Jalsa attendance number before the burst of new converts (again, a hypothetical example to illustrate the math), then we would expect roughly 11,666 additional attendees (1/6 x 70,000) to be present at Jalsa Salana.
Thus, the number of attendees at any given Jalsa Salana, as compared to previous years in that country, is an excellent barometer of approximate growth in numbers of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in said country.
When you had countries like India being reported to have a single year increase of 40 million Ahmadi Muslims in that one country alone, you’d expect Jalsa Salana India to grow many fold. Has anyone ever observed and documented that to be the case? I don’t think so.