Mirzā Ghulām Ahmad

Mirzā Ghulām Ahmad (February 13, 1835 – May 26, 1908) is an Indian religious leader and the founder of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam.

He claims to have been divinely appointed as the promised Messiah and Mahdi—which is the metaphorical second-coming of Jesus (mathīl-iʿIsā), in fulfillment of Islam's latter day prophecies, as well as the Mujaddid (centennial reviver) of the fourteenth Islamic century.

Born in 1835 to a prominent family in Qadian, Ghulam Ahmad emerges as a writer and debater for Islam.

When he is just over forty years of age, his father dies and around this time he believes that God begins to communicate with him.

In 1889, he takes a pledge of allegiance from forty of his supporters at Ludhiana and forms a community of followers upon what he claims is divine instruction, stipulating ten conditions of initiation, an event that marks the establishment of the Ahmadiyya movement.

The mission of the movement, according to him, is 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.

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 asserts that he had in fact survived crucifixion and died a natural death.

He travels extensively across the Punjab preaching his religious ideas and rallies support by combining a reformist program with his personal revelations, which he claims 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 is a prolific author and writes 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.

Many of his writings bear a polemical and apologetic tone in favor of Islam, seeking to establish its superiority as a religion through rational argumentation, often by articulating his own interpretations of Islamic teachings.

He advocates a peaceful propagation of Islam and emphatically argues against the permissibility of military Jihad under circumstances prevailing in the present age.

By the time of his death, he has gathered an estimated four hundred thousand followers, especially within the United Provinces, the Punjab and Sindh, and has built a dynamic religious organization with an executive body and its own printing press.

After his death he is succeeded by his close companion Hakīm Noor-ud-Dīn, who assumes 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.

Ghulam Ahmad's claim to be a subordinate (ummati) prophet within Islam will remain a central point of controversy between his followers and mainstream Muslims, who believe Muhammad to be the last prophet.

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