Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a religious teacher from Qadian in Gurdaspur district who founded the Ahmadiyya movement. He is not a figure of the Panth. His career belongs to the crowded religious ferment of late nineteenth century Punjab, when the Singh Sabha, the Arya Samaj, Christian missions and Muslim reform all competed for followers. His one direct encounter with the Sikhs, in 1895, was an attempt to claim Guru Nanak for Islam.

Family and early life. He was born on 13 February 1835 at Qadian, under Maharaja Ranjit Singh's rule. One Ahmadiyya history gives 1836, but its publisher's note prefers 1835. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says his father, Ghulam Murtaza, served the Lahore Darbar under Ranjit Singh and his successors, and that Ranjit Singh, who had confiscated the Ramgarhia chiefship's possessions, restored a large part of the family's ancestral estates to him.

The movement. The Encyclopaedia says he began in 1880 to publish a work answering Hindu reform movements, and in 1889 allowed his followers to pledge allegiance to him. Wikipedia places the first pledge, from forty followers, on 23 March 1889 at Ludhiana. In 1891 he claimed to be the Promised Messiah and the Mahdi, and the Muslim ulama turned against him. He died in Lahore on 26 May 1908. Wikipedia estimates 400,000 followers by then. The Encyclopaedia adds that after Partition the movement's seat moved to Rabwah in Pakistan.

Guru Nanak. The Encyclopaedia dates his first dealings with the Sikhs to 1895, at the height of his dispute with the Arya Samaj. Having read Swami Dayanand's Satyarth Prakash, which attacked every religion including the Sikh, he began a work in Urdu on the life of Guru Nanak. It set out to answer Dayanand, to separate legend from fact, and, the Encyclopaedia says, to win Sikhs over to Islam and persuade them that he was the Promised Messiah by proving that Guru Nanak had been a Muslim. The Lahore Ahmadiyya movement's own history names the book Sat Bachan and says he went to Dera Baba Nanak on 30 September 1895, had the coverings taken off the chola kept by Guru Nanak's descendants, and read Quranic verses on it. That is the movement's own account of what he found, not an independent finding. It adds that orthodox Sikhs were greatly upset. The Encyclopaedia says Sikh scholars answered his claims and refuted his arguments, and that the Arya Samaj journal Bharat Sudhar attacked him as part of its own effort to move closer to the Sikhs.

Key moments

• 23 March 1889: first pledge of allegiance, at Ludhiana.
• 1891: claims to be the Promised Messiah and the Mahdi; first annual gathering at Qadian.
• 30 September 1895: visits Dera Baba Nanak to examine the chola.
• 26 May 1908: dies in Lahore.

What he is remembered for. He is remembered as the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement. In the Panth's record he is remembered for the Sat Bachan episode, an attempt to claim Guru Nanak for Islam that Sikh scholars answered.