Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad 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 fulfillment of the Islamic prophecies regarding the end times, as well as the Mujaddid of the 14th Islamic century.
Born to a family with aristocratic roots in Qadian, rural Punjab, 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 claimed that God began to communicate with him. 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. 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. As opposed to the Christian and mainstream Islamic view of Jesus, being alive in heaven to return towards the end of time, Ahmad asserted that he had in fact survived crucifixion and died a natural death. 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 Ulama. He is known to have engaged in numerous public debates and dialogues with Christian missionaries, Muslim scholars and Hindu revivalists.
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 in 1880 and his death in May 1908. 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. He advocated a peaceful propagation of Islam and emphatically argued against the permissibility of military Jihad under circumstances prevailing in the present age. By the time of his death, he had gathered an estimated 400,000 followers, especially within the United Provinces, the Punjab and Sindh 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.
Although Ahmad is revered by Ahmadi Muslims as the promised Messiah and Imām Mahdi, Muhammad nevertheless remains the central figure in Ahmadiyya Islam. Ahmad's claim to be a subordinate prophet within Islam has remained a central point of controversy between his followers and mainstream Muslims, who believe Muhammad to be the last prophet.
Lineage and family
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a descendant of Mirza Hadi Beg, a member of the Barlas tribe. In 1530, Mirza Hadi Beg migrated from Samarkand along with an entourage of two hundred people consisting of his family, servants and followers. Travelling through Samarkand, they finally settled in the Punjab, India, where Mirza Hadi founded the town known today as Qadian during the reign of Emperor Babur, his distant relative. The family were all known as Mughals within the British governmental records of India probably due to the high positions it occupied within the Mughal Empire and their courts. Mirza Hadi Beg was granted a Jagir of several hundred villages and was appointed the Qadi of Qadian and the surrounding district. The descendants of Mirza Hadi are said to have held important positions within the Mughal Empire and had consecutively been the chieftains of Qadian.Life
Early life and education
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born on 13 February 1835 in Qadian, Punjab, then part of the Sikh Empire under Ranjit Singh. The surviving child of twins born to an affluent Mughal family. He learned to read the Arabic text of the Qur'an and studied basic Arabic grammar and the Persian language from a teacher named Fazil-e-Illahi. At the age of 10, he learned from a teacher named Fazl Ahmad. Again at the age of 17 or 18, he learnt from a teacher named Gul Ali Shah. In addition, he also studied some works on medicine from his father, Mirza Ghulam Murtaza, who was a physician. Ahmad's father, Mirza Ghulam Murtaza, was a local chieftain who served in the Sikh Army.From 1864 to 1868, upon his father's wishes, Ahmad worked as a clerk in Sialkot, where he would come into contact with Christian missionaries with whom he frequently engaged in debate. After 1868, he returned to Qadian, as per his father's wishes, where he was entrusted to look after some estate affairs. During all this time, Ahmad was known as a social recluse because he would spend most of his time in seclusion studying religious books and praying in the local mosque. As time passed, he began to engage more with the Christian missionaries, particularly in defending Islam against their criticism. He would often confront them in public debates, especially the ones based in the town of Batala.
In 1886, certain leaders of the Arya Samaj held discussion and debate with Ahmad about the truthfulness of Islam and asked for a sign to prove that Islam was a living religion. In order to dedicate special prayers for this purpose and so as to seek further divine guidance, Ahmad travelled to Hoshiarpur upon what he claimed was divine instruction. Here, he spent forty days in seclusion, a practice known as chilla-nashini. He travelled accompanied by three companions to the small two-storied house of one of his followers and was left alone in a room where his companions would bring him food and leave without speaking to him as he prayed and contemplated. He only left the house on Fridays and used an abandoned mosque for Jumu'ah. It is during this period that he declared God had given him the glad tidings of an illustrious son.
Taking of the ''Bay'ah''
Ahmad claimed divine appointment as a reformer as early as 1882 but did not take any pledge of allegiance or initiation. In December 1888, Ahmad announced that God had ordained that his followers should enter into a with him and pledge their allegiance to him. In January 1889, he published a pamphlet in which he laid out ten conditions or issues to which the initiate would abide by for the rest of his life. On 23 March 1889, he founded the Ahmadiyya community by taking a pledge from forty followers. The formal method of joining the Ahmadiyya movement included joining hands and reciting a pledge, although physical contact was not always necessary. This method of allegiance continued for the rest of his life and after his death by his successors.His claim
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad proclaimed that he was the Promised Messiah and Mahdi. He claimed to be the fulfilment of various prophecies found in world religions regarding the second coming of their founders. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's followers say that he never claimed to be the same physical Jesus who lived nineteen centuries earlier. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed that Jesus died a natural death, in contradiction to the traditional Muslim view of Jesus' physical ascension to heaven and the traditional Christian belief of Jesus' crucifixion. He claimed in his books that there was a general decay of Islamic life and a dire need of a messiah. He argued that, just as Jesus had appeared in the 14th century after Moses, the promised messiah, i.e. the Mahdi, must also appear in the 14th century after Muhammad.In Tazkiratush-Shahadatain, he wrote about the fulfillment of various prophecies. In it, he enumerated a variety of prophecies and descriptions from both the Qur'an and Hadith relating to the advent of the Mahdi and the descriptions of his age, which he ascribed to himself and his age. These include assertions that he was physically described in the Hadith and manifested various other signs; some of them being wider in scope, such as focusing on world events coming to certain points, certain conditions within the Muslim community, and varied social, political, economic, and physical conditions.
Post-claim
In time, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's claim of being the of his era became more explicit. In one of his most well-known and praised works, Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya, a voluminous work, he claimed to be the Messiah of Islam. Muslims have maintained that Jesus will return in the flesh during the last age. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, by contrast, asserted that Jesus had in fact survived crucifixion and died of old age much later in Kashmir, where he had migrated. According to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the promised Mahdi was a symbolic reference to a spiritual leader and not a military leader in the person of Jesus Christ as is believed by many Muslims. With this proclamation, he also rejected the idea of armed Jihad and argued that the conditions for such Jihad are not present in this age, which requires defending Islam by the pen and tongue but not with the sword. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad wrote two books named Tuhfa-e-Qaiseriya and Sitara-e-Qaiseriya in which he invited Queen Victoria to embrace Islam and forsake Christianity.Reaction of religious scholars
Following his claim to be the Promised Messiah and Mahdi, one of his adversaries prepared a Fatwa of disbelief against Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, declaring him a kafir, a deceiver, and a liar. The decree permitted killing him and his followers. It was taken all around India and was signed by some two hundred religious scholars.Some years later, a prominent Muslim leader and scholar, Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi, was to travel to the Hejaz to collect the opinions of the religious scholars of Mecca and Madina. He compiled these opinions in his work Husamul Haramain, in which he calls Ahmad was an apostate. The consensus of about thirty-four religious scholars was that Ahmad's beliefs were blasphemous and tantamount to apostasy and that he must be punished by imprisonment and, if necessary, by execution.