If the whole world is waiting for the Messiah, why is nobody watching?
Something I keep wondering about is why basically nothing the Jamaat puts out ever goes viral.
That is how social media works. Someone says something funny, smart or actually meaningful, people share it, the clip takes off and suddenly millions of people have seen it.
Religious content does this all the time.
Bryce Crawford became huge through Christian content. Father David Michael Moses has had videos with millions of views and more than a million followers on Instagram. He has even said that atheists share his videos. Mufti Menk was already a known Islamic scholar, but social media made him known to a much bigger international audience.
So clearly people are interested in religion, spirituality and life advice.
Where is the Ahmadiyya version of this?
KM5 has been Khalifa for more than 20 years. There are endless sermons, speeches, clips, MTA programmes, translations and social media accounts. The Jamaat has studios, editors, professional production and an international organisation promoting him.
And still, where is the video that actually got out of the Ahmadiyya bubble?
Where are the millions of random people saying, damn, this guy actually has something to say?
I honestly cannot think of one.
That is pretty weird for a community that keeps saying humanity desperately needs its message and that the world is waiting for the Promised Messiah.
Maybe people just are not that interested.
And I think there is an even simpler problem. KM5 is not charismatic. He is a pretty poor speaker. He does not come across as especially sharp or original. There is just not much there that makes you want to keep listening.
And it is not because nobody gives him a platform. He has MTA, professional production teams and an entire international organisation constantly promoting what he says.
He has all of that and people still are not watching.
That is the thing about social media. You can tell your own members over and over again how important someone is. You cannot make random people care.
Even Ahmadis themselves do not seem particularly interested in a lot of this content. Just look at the engagement and compare it with the huge membership numbers the Jamaat has claimed over the years. Whatever you think the real number is, you would expect a supposedly global and rapidly growing religious movement to get a lot more people watching its own Khalifa.
At some point you have to ask if the problem is really the marketing or if people simply do not find the content that interesting.
The same thing bothers me about KM5 constantly giving speeches about world peace.
He keeps appealing to presidents, prime ministers and other political leaders. Be just. Stop fighting. Avoid war. Think about humanity.
Okay, but what is that actually supposed to achieve?
Look at the world. A lot of people in power are hardly examples of morality. Politics is full of corruption, ego, self interest and manipulation. If political leaders could simply be trusted to act according to moral principles, we would not be in half the mess we are in.
So why keep talking to the people at the top and asking them to behave better?
That is not how democracy is supposed to work. You do not find a good king and hope he develops a conscience. You limit power and you make leaders answer to the people.
Why not talk to ordinary people?
Tell people to defend democracy. Organise. Protest peacefully. Hold governments accountable. Vote bad leaders out. Push back when governments are taking their countries in the wrong direction.
But instead it always seems to come back to the same idea. Talk to the ruler and hope the ruler fixes things.
Maybe that is part of the bigger problem.
The Jamaat keeps telling itself that the world needs to hear its message. We live in a time where some guy with a phone can say something people connect with and millions of people will hear it.
So where is the Jamaat?
If the world is really waiting for what you have to say, why does everyone keep scrolling?