The fact is that in Anwar-e-Khilafat and A'ina-i-Sadaqat, Hazrat
Khalifatul Masih did not at all say that the non-Ahmadis, by their
rejection of the Promised Messiah, had thrown themselves outside the
apparent outward fold of Islam.

In Anwar-i-Khilafat, there is an expression that we should not take
the non-Ahmadis to be Muslims. But it does not mean that we have
rejected the idea of taking them as Muslims even as far as the outward
form is concerned. Otherwise, expressions of this kind, in their
limited sense and meaning, have often been used by the Promised
Messiah himself. For instance take the following quotations:

"It is a firm proposition in the Hadith that where a man says in
regard to a momin that he is a kafir, the man who says this, himself
he becomes a kafir. So in my case, when nearly 200 maulvis have
declared that I am a kafir ; and they applied a fatwa of kufr on me;
and when, on the basis of their own fatwa it stands established that
he who says in regard to a real momin that he has become a kafir, he
himself thereby, becomes a kafir, the remedy in such cases is easy. If
the rest of the people have even a grain of honesty and iman, and if
they are not mere hypocrites, they should come forward and denounce
these maulvis, and their fatwa against me, name by name, in a big
poster, and declare that they had all become kafirs, because they had
said in regard to a momin that he was a kafir. When they have
publicly, and quite openly disassociated themselves from this unjust
fatwa, I shall readily take them as Muslims - provided in their action
there is no trace of hypocrisy, and provided they do not seek to term
as false open and obvious signs and miracles." (Haqiqatul Wahyi, page 165)

Now please think very seriously here. Although the Promised Messiah in
this passage does not take the non-Ahmadis to be Muslims, you
interpret the general sense of the passage to mean that there is here
no denial involved of the fact that outwardly they still remain formal
Muslims, so to say, then what is the difficulty in holding that
precisely this, and no more is the sense and meaning of the passages
under reference from Anwar-i-Khilafat and A'ina-i-Sadaqat ? In this
case, too, there is no intention to deny that outwardly, in any case,
such Muslims remained formal Muslims.

Now remains the specific passage in A'ina-i-Sadaqat. So it is to be
remembered that words of this kind, in Islam, have been used in two
meanings. One meaning is to say that the person in question is a
non-Muslim. The second is that the person in question is alien to the
real spirit of Islam, and he has fallen a victim to a serious error in
belief. This is what the Holy Prophet Muhammad, himself, has to say on
the point:

"Where a man sallies forth to give support to an unjust person,
knowing that he is unjust, the supporter, thereby, throws himself
outside the bounds of Islam."