Origins

The Ahmadiyya movement was established in 1889, in Qadian, a village in the Punjab region in northern India. Its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a member of a landed family whose ancestors had followed Babur from Afghanistan to India in the early sixteenth century and prospered in the Mughal Empire which he founded. It was in the context of the decline of that empire, and of Muslim political power in much of India, that Ahmad’s work as a teacher and reformer developed. Like many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Muslim religious leaders in India, Ahmad responded to the loss of power with a defensive and revivalist message that called for internal reform and a struggle against external enemies. The danger seemed particularly acute during the last decades of the nineteenth century as competing reform and revival movements both became politicized and part of the secular Indian nationalist response to British colonial power. Ahmad saw his role as a missionary defending an essentially conservative view of Muslim tradition against both Hindu and Christian missions. His defence, however, became a subject of controversy among Muslims because of the heterodox nature of his message, which included a fundamental redefinition of Muslim doctrine, and, in particular, his role as leader. The problem of legitimate leadership has long been of great concern to the Islamic world.

In the seventh century, after the death of Muhammad, Islam had divided into two main branches. The majority Sunnis believed that the Prophet had left neither a spiritual nor a secular heir. Civil power, therefore, passed to elected leaders, and religious tradition became the responsibility of the ulema, learned teachers who knew the law and were able to interpret it for ordinary believers. The other branch, the Shias or Shiites, maintained that Muhammad had designated his son-in-law Ali and the descendants from Ali’s marriage to his daughter Fatima as both his spiritual and his secular successors. There are a range of Shiite sects, each recognizing the authority of a particular lineage of leaders (imams) but ultimately tracing their descent back to Ali and Fatima. Although the Ahmadis follow their own leader, or khalifa, who exercises spiritual authority over his followers, they are not Shiites. Rather, they are Sunnis who insist that the Ahmadis represent the true mainstream of Muslim orthodox tradition. They therefore attract the opposition of both Muslim governments and learned teachers, who consider their founder to be a false prophet and his followers heretics.

In 1882 Ahmad began to claim divine revelation as the source of his ideas. He was recognized as a mujaddid (renewer of faith), and he continues to be so acknowledged to the present day. But his claims as a leader were enhanced over time from a mujaddid to a mahdi (rightly guided one) and the promised messiah. His prophecies attracted ridicule as well as support, and he became an increasingly controversial figure. In 1888 Ahmad invited his followers to join him in his movement for reform, and the following year they began to swear allegiance to him as the leader of a particular sect. Those who joined were first called Mirzais or Qadianis, but, by the turn of the twentieth century, they were known as Ahmadiyyas, after one of the Prophet Muhammad’s names. The shorter form, Ahmadis, is now in more general use.

Two central doctrinal interpretations separate Ahmadiyya teaching from mainstream Islam. Muslims generally believe in the resurrection of Jesus and the future appearance of a messiah in his likeness. In Ahmad’s teachings, Christ died like other prophets, not on the cross but later in Kashmir. It was Ahmad, as the mahdi and messiah, who had appeared in the likeness of Jesus. In this context, he argued, Christians should be open to the message of Islam and its new prophetic leader. Ahmad’s mission was not limited to individuals within the faith who had gone astray, but was also directed to any who had been waiting for the messiah, now cast in Islamic, rather than Christian, terms. The other major challenge to the Sunni Muslim tradition was Ahmad’s redefinition of the jihad and the role of the mahdi and messiah. Rather than the traditional struggle against non-believers, he preached a peaceful mission that would attract non-Muslims and make violence unnecessary. Ahmad’s rationalist message, with its emphasis on debate and argument, was particularly attractive to the urban, educated middle class, and it spread as well among Muslims in the countryside. It has continued to mobilize new adherents in response to missionary activity, which has spread throughout the world.

Ahmad died in 1908, but the controversies aroused by his teachings continued to isolate his followers from mainstream Sunni Islam. The debate centred on the nature of his leadership and whether he claimed to be a new prophet, therefore challenging traditional Muslim teaching, which declared Muhammad to be the last prophet. Although Ahmad did call himself a prophet (nabi), he insisted that his role and place were subordinate to those of Muhammad. Within the movement, the debate produced a split between a minority group centred in Lahore, which sought to minimize differences with mainstream Sunni teaching, and the majority in Qadian, which emphasized Ahmad’s distinctive role and that of his successors, elected for life to exercise ultimate religious authority. The challenge from within, in addition to the charge of heresy from outside the community, resulted in an increasing emphasis on separate institutions, reflected in a system of branches that were related to the centre through a largely elected advisory council. As well, Ahmadis have a distinctive legal system, schools, a college for the training of missionaries, and a range of organizations that serve the needs of various professions, women, children, and the elderly. Newspapers, journals, and tracts initiated by the founder carry the movement’s message and create a distinct identity within the community.

The Ahmadiyya movement has always placed particular emphasis on missionary work (tabligh), both in northern India and throughout the world. The success of this activity is apparent in the present size of the Ahmadi population – approximately 10 million people in 127 countries – and in the opposition that it continues to attract in many Muslim countries. The first overseas mission was opened in Woking, England, in 1912. A Berlin office followed a decade later. The movement has been active in Africa, particularly the western part of the continent, since the 1920s; it has built schools and health centres and mobilized a large number of followers there. The funding for such work has generally been raised within the community, but there has been an interest in developing relations with such organizations as the Canadian International Development Agency in order to promote more substantial projects. The publications of the movement now appear in more than a hundred languages, as do its translations of the Koran. A particularly symbolic reflection of the success of its mission was the opening in 1982 of the first new mosque in Spain since the end of Muslim rule in the fifteenth century.

In 1947 the central institutions of the Ahmadiyya movement were moved from Indian Punjab to Rabwah in the new state of Pakistan. Since that time, the religious training college in Rabwah, the Jamia Ahmadiyah, has produced the missionaries who have carried the Ahmadiyya message throughout the world. There are currently 500 missionaries at work, five of them in Canada. Increasing official antagonism to Ahmadis in Pakistan has, however, turned their current khalifa, Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, into a refugee. Since 1984 he has lived in exile in Great Britain. Rabwah remains the site of most of the movement’s major institutions, but other centres are developing, a reflection of both the troubles in Pakistan and the breadth of the enterprise. Small colleges that train local missionaries have been established in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Gambia. Since the government of Pakistan no longer allows foreign students to enrol in the Jamia Ahmadiyah program, a new college, which would share the mandate to world missions of the Rabwah-based institution, may be established in Canada.