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Mirzā Ghulām Ahmad (13 February 1835 – 26 May 1908) was an Indian religious leader and the founder of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam. He claimed to have been divinely appointed as the promised Messiah and Mahdi, in the likeness of Jesus (mathīl-iʿIsā),[1][2] in fulfillment of Islam's eschatological prophecies, as well as the Mujaddid (centennial reviver) of the 14th Islamic century.[3][4][5]
Born in 1835 to a prominent family in Qadian, Ghulam Ahmad emerged as a writer and debater for Islam. When he was just over forty years of age, his father died and around that time he believed that God began to communicate with him.[6][7][8] In 1889, he took a pledge of allegiance from forty of his supporters at Ludhiana and formed a community of followers upon what he claimed was divine instruction, stipulating ten conditions of initiation, an event that marks the establishment of the Ahmadiyya movement.[9][10][11] The mission of the movement, according to him, was the reinstatement of the absolute oneness of God, the revival of Islam through the moral reformation of society along Islamic ideals, and the global propagation of Islam in its pristine form.[12][13] As opposed to the Christian and mainstream Islamic view of Jesus (or Isa), being alive in heaven to return towards the end of time, Ghulam Ahmad asserted that he had in fact survived crucifixion and died a natural death.[14] He traveled extensively across the Punjab preaching his religious ideas and rallied support by combining a reformist programme with his personal revelations which he claimed to receive from God, attracting thereby substantial following within his lifetime as well as considerable hostility particularly from the Muslim Ulema. He is known to have engaged in numerous public debates and dialogues with Christian missionaries, Muslim scholars and Hindu revivalists.
Ghulam Ahmad was a prolific author and wrote more than ninety books on various religious, theological and moral subjects between the publication of the first volume of Barahin-i-Ahmadiyya (The Proofs of Islam, his first major work) in 1880 and his death in May 1908.[15][16] Many of his writings bear a polemical and apologetic tone in favour of Islam, seeking to establish its superiority as a religion through rational argumentation, often by articulating his own interpretations of Islamic teachings.[17][18] He advocated a peaceful propagation of Islam and emphatically argued against the permissibility of military Jihad under circumstances prevailing in the present age.[19][13] By the time of his death, he had gathered an estimated 400,000 followers, especially within the United Provinces, the Punjab and Sindh[20][21] and had built a dynamic religious organisation with an executive body and its own printing press. After his death he was succeeded by his close companion Hakīm Noor-ud-Dīn who assumed the title of Khalīfatul Masīh (successor of the Messiah).
Although Ghulam Ahmad is revered by Ahmadi Muslims as the promised Messiah and Imām Mahdi, Muhammad nevertheless remains the central figure in Ahmadiyya Islam.[22][23] Ghulam Ahmad's claim to be a subordinate (ummati) prophet within Islam has remained a central point of controversy between his followers and mainstream Muslims, who believe Muhammad to be the last prophet and await the physical return of Jesus.[24][25]
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Ahmadiyya (/ɑːməˈdiə/;[1] officially, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community[2] or the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at; Arabic: الجماعة الإسلامية الأحمدية, transliterated: al-Jamā'ah al-Islāmiyyah al-Aḥmadiyyah; Urdu: احمدیہ مسلم جماعت) is an Islamic religious movement founded in Punjab, British India, near the end of the 19th century.[3][4][5][6] It originated with the life and teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908),[7] who claimed to have appeared in fulfilment of the prophecies concerning the world's reformer during the end times; and who was to bring about, by peaceful means, the final triumph of Islam and herald the eschaton as predicted in Islamic scriptures as well as the traditions of various world religions.[8] He claimed to have been divinely appointed as both the promised Mahdi (Guided One) and Messiah awaited by Muslims.[9][10][11][12] Adherents of the Ahmadiyya—a term adopted expressly in reference to Muhammad's alternative name Aḥmad.[13][14][15][16]—are known as Ahmadi Muslims or simply Ahmadis
Ahmadi thought emphasizes the belief that Islam is the final dispensation for humanity as revealed to Muhammad and the necessity of restoring to it its true intent and pristine form, which had been lost through the centuries.[17] Ahmadiyya adherents consider Ahmad to have appeared as the Mahdi—bearing the qualities of Jesus in accordance with their reading of scriptural prophecies—to revitalize Islam and set in motion its moral system that would bring about lasting peace.[18][19][20] They believe that upon divine guidance he purged Islam of foreign accretions in belief and practice by championing what is, in their view, Islam’s original precepts as practised by Muhammad and the early Muslim community.[21][22] Ahmadis thus view themselves as leading the propagation and renaissance of Islam.[23][24]
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad established the movement on 23 March 1889 by formally accepting allegiance from his supporters. Since his death, the Community has been led by a number of Caliphs and has spread to 209 countries and territories of the world as of 2016 with concentrations in South Asia, West Africa, East Africa and Indonesia. The Ahmadis have a strong missionary tradition and formed the first Muslim missionary organization to arrive in Britain and other Western countries.[25][26][27][28][29] Currently, the Community is led by its Caliph, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, and is estimated to number between 10 and 20 million worldwide.[30][31][32][33]
The population is almost entirely contained in the single, highly organized and united movement. In this sense there is only one major branch. However, in the early history of the Community, a number of Ahmadis broke away over the nature of Ahmad's prophethood and succession and formed the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement for the Propagation of Islam, which today represents a small fraction of all Ahmadis. Some Ahmadiyya-specific beliefs have been thought of as opposed to contemporary mainstream Islamic thought since the movement's birth, and some Ahmadis have subsequently faced persecution.[34][33][35][36] Many Muslims consider Ahmadi Muslims as either kafirs or heretics.[37][38][39][40]
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