From Sufism to Ahmadiyya

A Muslim Minority Movement in South Asia

Adil Hussain Khan

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253015297
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'India e dell'Asia meridionale

The Ahmadiyya Muslim community represents the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), a charismatic leader whose claims of spiritual authority brought him into conflict with most other Muslim leaders of the time. The controversial movement originated in rural India in the latter part of the 19th century and is best known for challenging current conceptions of Islamic orthodoxy. Despite missionary success and expansion throughout the world, particularly in Western Europe, North America, and parts of Africa, Ahmadis have effectively been banned from Pakistan. Adil Hussain Khan traces the origins of Ahmadi Islam from a small Sufi-style brotherhood to a major transnational organization, which many Muslims believe to be beyond the pale of Islam.

1 Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani before Prophethood

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s Family Background

Accounts of the life of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad usually begin with descriptions of the Mirza᾽i family’s sixteenth-century migration from Persian Central Asia to India. This format follows the chief source of information on his family background, located in a similarly structured autobiographical account which takes up a considerable portion of the footnotes of his Kitāb al-Bariyya (Book of Exoneration).¹ Ghulam Ahmad’s emphasis on lineage played an important role in establishing credibility, both religiously and socially, for Jama῾at-i Ahmadiyya, and it sheds light on Ghulam Ahmad’s mission by characterizing the colonial context of the time. The fact that lineage has consistently been presented by Ahmadi sources as requisite for understanding the life and claims of the movement’s founder should be an indication of the values of the early community and of the nineteenth-century Indian society from which it emerged.

The first recorded ancestor of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is Mirza Hadi Beg, who was apparently a member of the Mughal Barlas tribe.² Ghulam Ahmad presented a genealogical tree detailing his descent from Mirza Hadi Beg, who was the first family member to migrate to India. Ghulam Ahmad claimed Persian descent throughout the course of his religious career, which played a crucial role in providing support for his broader spiritual mission. This claim makes his genealogy problematic, however, since the Barlas tribe of Central Asia was largely of Turkic origin with mixed Mongolian ancestry.³ Ghulam Ahmad emphasized having a Persian lineage due to a hadith he interpreted to mean that the mahdī (messianic guided one) would be of Persian descent,⁴ even though it conflicted with accepted views of the Barlas tribe being of Turko-Mongolian origin. Ghulam Ahmad acknowledged the contradiction but affirmed his ancestors were Persian, which he based purely on divine revelation. Other hadith have led Muslims to believe that the mahdī would be of Arab descent with a lineage emanating from the tribe of the Prophet.⁵ Ghulam Ahmad was able to resolve the conflict once it was revealed to him that his paternal grandmothers—meaning the wives of his paternal grandfathers—possessed Arab ancestry, which stemmed from the Prophet Muhammad himself.⁶

The Barlas tribe was headed by Haji Beg Barlas, who lived in Kish, south of Samarqand, prior to the rise of Timur (Tamerlane). When the tribal leadership passed to Timur in the fourteenth century, members of the Barlas tribe moved west to Khurasan, where they remained until the sixteenth century. In 1530, Mirza Hadi Beg with some two hundred family members and attendants migrated to India, where they founded a village called Islampur, about ten miles west of the Beas River and roughly seventy miles northeast of Lahore. The village was part of a large tract of land (jāgīr) given to Hadi Beg by the imperial court of the Mughal emperor Babar,⁷ who shared a tribal affiliation with the Barlas through Timur. Hadi Beg was granted legal jurisdiction over the area as a local qādī (Islamic magistrate), so the village came to be known as Islampur Qadi. The name of the village evolved into various forms based on cognates, until “Islampur” was dropped altogether, and it simply came to be known as Qadian.⁸

The original jāgīr encompassed over seventy neighboring villages, which was a sizable domain. Within the context of Mughal India, a large jāgīr more closely resembled a semi-independent territory than a family’s oversized estate. As such, the head of the family, as the jāgīrdār, took on a feudal role which included relative sovereignty over the jāgīr. The privilege of local autonomy entailed that the old village of Qadian be a walled settlement, like others in India at the time. The fortress-style wall of Qadian had four towers. It stood twenty-two feet high by eighteen feet wide surrounding the homes of a standing militia. By the time of Ghulam Ahmad’s great-grandfather, Mirza Gul Muhammad (d. 1800), who inherited the jāgīr, a considerably reduced force remained, including a cavalry and three large guns. Aside from references underscoring a military presence, Gul Muhammad’s Qadian is portrayed as a place that fostered the growth of Islamic thought through generous endowments for Muslim intellectuals, despite external strife.⁹

As the Mughal stronghold faded, so did the influence of loyalist jāgīrdārs. When Gul Muhammad passed away, his son, Ghulam Ahmad’s grandfather Mirza ῾Ata Muhammad, inherited the jāgīr. During this period, the Sikh insurgency was gaining strength throughout the Punjab. The Sikhs steadily captured each village from the estate until only Qadian remained under the family’s control. In 1802, Jassa Singh (d. 1803) and the Sikhs of the Ramgarhia misal (confederate state) seized Qadian.¹⁰ The takeover resulted in the burning of the library, which housed a collection of Islamic texts, including Qur᾽anic manuscripts accumulated over previous generations. The main mosque was converted into a Sikh temple, which functions as such to this day. The surviving family members were expelled from Qadian and forced to take refuge in a nearby village, where they lived in exile for sixteen years. Hostilities continued between camps, resulting in the murder of Mirza ῾Ata Muhammad, who was poisoned by rivals in 1814.

Ranjit Singh consolidated his rule of the Punjab in the following years, enabling the family to negotiate a deal with the Sikhs.¹¹ In 1818, the family, headed by Ghulam Ahmad’s father, Mirza Ghulam Murtaza, was conditionally permitted to return to Qadian in exchange for military service. Ghulam Murtaza fulfilled his obligations alongside his brothers by enlisting in Ranjit Singh’s army. Ahmadi accounts often stress that family members—especially Ghulam Murtaza—performed courageously in campaigns in Kashmir, Peshawar, and Multan.¹² Few mention, however, that these campaigns were fought against fellow Muslims rebelling against the Sikhs as mujāhidīn (those making jihad), which is important within the colonial context of the time. Sir Lepel Griffin noted in his survey of the Punjab’s aristocracy that Ghulam Murtaza “was continually employed on active service” under “Nao Nahal Singh, Sher Singh, and the Darbar.”¹³ Sher Singh’s forces stopped Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly—more commonly known as Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi or Sayyid Ahmad shahīd (the martyr)—and Shah Muhammad Isma῾il, the grandson of Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, at Balakot in 1831.¹⁴ Both iconic figures are believed to have been martyred en route to Kashmir via Peshawar during the battle. Although Mirza Ghulam Murtaza’s role in these battles is unclear, he likely fought with Sikhs against Muslims, which might alarm many Ahmadis today, even though such incidents indeed occurred.

When the tours of duty finished, Ghulam Murtaza and his brothers were each given a pension of 700 rupees per annum. By the 1830s, the brothers’ loyalty and services had been rewarded with the return of four villages from their ancestral estate, including Qadian. Altogether, the family managed to recover a total of seven villages from lost property in due course.¹⁵ This process was made easier following the death of Ranjit Singh in 1839, which enabled the British to extend their rule over India in a relatively short amount of time after the First Anglo-Sikh War.

According to contemporary Ahmadi sources, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born in Qadian on Friday, February 13, 1835, in an atmosphere marred by the family’s political and economic decline. The use of this date was a relatively late development, however, and its accuracy may be called into question. Estimates regarding Ghulam Ahmad’s birthdate have varied from 1831 to 1840. In his own account, Ghulam Ahmad said that he was born in 1839 or 1840.¹⁶ For several years during the reign of Ghulam Ahmad’s second successor, the official birthdate was listed as 1836 until it was finally changed to 1835. The 1835 date has long since been accepted by Jama῾at-i Ahmadiyya and currently appears in all official publications. The motivation for the change concerned the fulfillment of prophecies pertaining to the coming of the mahdī and the messiah. The 1835 date was settled by combining the indirect implications of Ghulam Ahmad’s statements about the phase of the moon during his divinely ordained birth, and the assumption that his birth must have taken place on a Friday, which is widely regarded as the holiest day of the week in Islam.¹⁷

Ghulam Ahmad had a twin sister named Jannat who was born before him but died a few days later.¹⁸ He grew up with a sense of remorse for his distressed father, who witnessed the withering away of the family’s ancestral estate. Although the deterioration of social standing played a key role in Ghulam Ahmad’s portrayal of his childhood as tragic, the family still maintained a respectable status in comparison to India’s underprivileged classes. This attitude was common among prominent Muslim families of the Punjab throughout the period of colonial expansion, when successful campaigns of the Sikhs, and later the British, resulted in the steady decline of the Muslim aristocracy. The apathy and resentment shared by Muslim families regarding their waning influence in the nineteenth century has been captured by Ghulam Ahmad in numerous passages lamenting his family’s losses. Ghulam Ahmad placed high value on his aristocratic background. There are indications of this in the way he occasionally signed his publications “Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Chieftain (ra᾽īs) of Qadian.”¹⁹ In later publications, this signature was largely replaced with the accolade masīh-i maw῾ūd (promised messiah). It still provides a sense of the importance of the sociopolitical title ra᾽īs, however, even if its use by Ghulam Ahmad was circumstantial following the disclosure of his spiritual claims.²⁰

Education and Spiritual Training

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad began his education with private tutoring at age seven, which was typical for children of affluent families in rural Punjab. His first instructor was a local Hanafi tutor from Qadian named Fazl Ilahi, who taught Ghulam Ahmad the Qur᾽an and elementary Persian. At around age ten, Ghulam Ahmad began studying with an Ahl-i Hadith tutor named Fazl Ahmad from Ferozwala, District Gujranwala, who traveled to Qadian to teach Ghulam Ahmad intermediate Arabic grammar.²¹ At around age sixteen, there was a small break in the lessons when Ghulam Ahmad married his maternal uncle’s daughter, Hurmat Bibi, but he resumed his studies shortly thereafter with a Shi῾i tutor named Gul ῾Ali Shah from nearby Batala. These lessons involved advanced Arabic grammar, logic (mantiq), and philosophy (hikmat).²² In the early stages of the arrangement, Gul ῾Ali Shah would travel to Qadian, but Ghulam Ahmad soon began traveling to Batala to continue his studies from there. In Batala, Ghulam Ahmad developed a close friendship with a classmate, Muhammad Husayn Batalwi, who was also studying with Gul ῾Ali Shah. The two maintained their friendship long after their schooling had ended, even though Batalwi went on to hold a leading position in the Ahl-i Hadith movement, which has since become one of Jama῾at-i Ahmadiyya’s most enduring rivals. This explains why Muhammad Husayn Batalwi is best known among Ahmadis for his bitter antagonism towards Ghulam Ahmad, following the proclamation of Ghulam Ahmad’s messianic claims.²³

According to Ahmadi historians, the course of instruction received from these three tutors represents the entirety of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s formal education and training. Ahmadi sources emphasize its simplicity in comparison to the curriculum for traditional Sunni ῾ulamā in India at the time. If these reports are taken at face value, Ghulam Ahmad’s education was based almost entirely on language acquisition, which only serves as the basis for traditional Islamic scholarship. This would make it useful to know the other subjects, if any, that Ghulam Ahmad studied in his youth. One cannot presume that Fazl Ilahi taught Ghulam Ahmad Hanafi fiqh (jurisprudence) simply because he was Hanafi, or that Fazl Ahmad taught Ghulam Ahmad hadith criticism simply because he was a member of the Ahl-i Hadith movement. Similarly, one cannot presume that Gul ῾Ali Shah guided Ghulam Ahmad through the subtleties of the arguments pertaining to the coming of the mahdī simply because he was Shi῾a. This view of Ghulam Ahmad’s Islamic education, or perhaps lack of education, is precisely the image that Jama῾at-i Ahmadiyya maintains with firm resolve. When questioned about the inconsistencies in Ghulam Ahmad’s religious education, Sayyid Mir Mahmud Ahmad Nasir, a prominent Ahmadi scholar and longtime principal of the Ahmadi seminary in Rabwah, made it clear that this background demonstrated Ghulam Ahmad was ummī (unlettered) in the same way as the Prophet Muhammad. He further elaborated that all prophets of God, including Ghulam Ahmad, received knowledge from Allah, who has knowledge of all things.²⁴

Ghulam Ahmad was not linked to any religious institution, unlike the majority of scholars of the Muslim world, who typically underwent a period of formal study of traditional subjects commonly referred to as the Islamic sciences. In this sense, Ghulam Ahmad was simply not a traditional Islamic scholar, which may account for some of the methodological irregularities that developed later in his career. In contrast, even Ghulam Ahmad’s first successor, Maulvi Hakim Nur al-Din (1841–1914),²⁵ spent a few years studyin...