Far from the Caliph's Gaze

Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian

Nicholas H. A. Evans

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501715693
• eBook ISBN: 9781501715709
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do you prove that you're Muslim?

This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India's Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minority—people for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: What evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith?

In Far from the Caliph's Gaze Nicholas H. A. Evans explores how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in Qadian in northern India. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya community's founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis' spiritual leader—the caliph—since partition, and the believers who live there now and act as its guardians must confront daily the reality of this separation even while attempting to make their Muslimness verifiable.

By exploring the centrality of this separation to the ethics of everyday life in Qadian, Far from the Caliph's Gaze presents a new model for the academic study of religious doubt, one that is not premised on a concept of belief but instead captures the richness with which people might experience problematic relationships to truth.

1

THE HISTORY OF THE AHMADI-CALIPH RELATIONSHIP

In the monumental opus What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed attempts to capture a way of being Muslim that flourished from the end of Islam’s classical period until about 1850. It was, Ahmed argues, a form of being Muslim that was creative and explorative, that could openly embrace contradiction, that did not need to legitimate itself through a mimesis of pristine authenticity.¹ In short, it was a way of inhabiting a religious identity that has never been available to Qadian’s Ahmadis. Indeed, it was only after the collapse of this self-confident and taken-for-granted understanding of what it meant to be Muslim that the conditions emerged in which the creation of the Ahmadiyya Jama‘at could be dreamt of. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad belonged to a generation of Indian reformers and religious thinkers who began their careers in the period after the rebellion of 1857, when the last remnants of the Mughal Empire were finally destroyed, and Islam’s fall from primacy in the subcontinent was laid bare. After these calamitous events, a number of self-conscious attempts were undertaken to reform Islam and to recapture a sense of surety in being Muslim. Two of these reform movements in particular are often cited as representing contrasting responses to the need to reform Islam. These were a modernist embrace of the west, as typified by the establishment of Aligarh Muslim University, and a reactionary retreat into tradition, often associated with the establishment of the Islamic seminary at Deoband.² In this broader context, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s lifework must be seen as an attempt to recuperate Muslim confidence, in particular through a muscular and argumentative engagement with Hinduism and Christianity. The community he founded was part of a larger set of cultural movements that sought to recapture a surety about what it meant to be Muslim when faced with a situation in which such identity could no longer be assumed in an unproblematic fashion. For his modern-day followers, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is understood to have achieved this goal with astonishing success, for he removed the inconsistencies that had crept into Islamic theology over the preceding centuries and delivered to his followers a body of religious truth that could be known and understood in a clear, rational, and uncomplicated fashion. As we saw in the last chapter, this does not, however, mean that my interlocutors in Qadian enjoy a straightforward relationship to truth. While the truths of Ghulam Ahmad may be eminently knowable, they are not always provable, and consequently, contemporary Ahmadis in Qadian attempt to evidence truth by cultivating the demonstrability of their relationship with the caliph. The importance of the Ahmadi-caliph relationship nonetheless developed only slowly in the decades following Ghulam Ahmad’s death: quite how this relationship came to be such a foundational aspect of what it means to prove truth in Qadian is the subject of this chapter.

The Promised Messiah

We can say with certainty that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born in Qadian, but other details about his entry into this world are a matter of modern-day dispute. Ahmadi sources as late as 1914 place his birth date in 1838 to 1839,³ and yet nowadays, the Jama‘at argues that his date of birth was February 13, 1835, claiming earlier estimates had been wrong due to a lack of records from the period.⁴ This issue is contentious because Mirza Ghulam Ahmad prophesied that he would live to be more or less eighty years of age.⁵ Non-Ahmadis continue to argue that he was born in the late 1830s and that his prophecy was therefore fraudulent. For Ahmadis who insist on the earlier birth date of 1835, however, this is an example of a glorious fulfilled prophecy.

According to his own writings, Ahmad’s family had been the major landholders in the area of Qadian during the Mughal period but lost their holdings in 1802 due to Sikh political ascendency in Punjab.⁶ The family was forced from Qadian and lived in impoverished exile until 1818, when they were allowed to return in exchange for military service. After the family sided with the British in the rebellion of 1857, their fortunes were somewhat reversed, and seemingly because of this, Ghulam Ahmad remained loyal to the British throughout his life.⁷ Indeed, Ghulam Ahmad repeatedly celebrated the British in his writings and insisted on the justness of colonial rule in India.⁸ This family history continues to inform present-day understandings of colonial history in Qadian, with many Ahmadis seeing the British as the saviors of Muslims from Hindu and Sikh oppression. Moreover, Ghulam Ahmad’s defense of the colonial state forms the basis of the Ahmadis’ firmly held doctrine that Muslims should pledge allegiance to a ruling government so long as it guarantees religious freedom (a doctrine that, from the outside, looks very much like secularism). Among opponents in present-day South Asia, however, these are some of the most vilified aspects of Ghulam Ahmad’s writings. For these critics of the Ahmadiyya Jama‘at, this doctrine is evidence that Ahmad was an agent of colonial powers, tasked with dividing the Muslims of India.

Ghulam Ahmad lived the first few decades of his life in relative obscurity but rose rapidly to prominence in 1880 with the publication of the first volume of what Ahmadis regard as his magnum opus, the Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya, or Proofs of Ahmadiyya.⁹ It was at this time that he began to make his first and most modest claims to a special spiritual standing, by implying that he was the mujaddid of the era.¹⁰ A mujaddid, often assumed in Islamic tradition to be a scholar, is thought to live at the turn of every century in the Islamic calendar and to act as a reformer.

In the decades after the publication of Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya, Ghulam Ahmad embarked on a career of religious debate, argument, and disputation that was, even for this time, “remarkable.”¹¹ He published an extensive catalog of books, pamphlets, and tracts; he issued challenges to his enemies, and he engaged in public debates. At first, Ahmad positioned himself as a defender of Islam, but he also began to increasingly debate and argue with other Muslim reformers. A number of these debates were high profile and controversial, and they were also frequently inconclusive.¹² In 1896, Ahmad predicted the death of a Hindu polemicist of the reform group the Arya Samaj, with whom he had clashed in the past. This Hindu reformer was assassinated within six months of the prediction by people unconnected with Ghulam Ahmad, but the coincidence of the prediction with the assassination was enough to attract the notice of the police.¹³ If Ahmad’s goal had been to bring attention to his spiritual claims, then through his long career of disputation and prophecy, he had succeeded. In engaging in arguments with Muslim, Christian, and Hindu opponents, in issuing challenges, and by virtue of his unique theology, Ahmad had by the beginning of the twentieth century aroused the hostility of every other reform group in Punjab.¹⁴ Throughout this period of remarkable public activity, Ahmad refined and gradually enlarged his own claims to special spiritual standing. Had he claimed only to be a reformer, he could have remained simply an unconventional defender of the faith, but it was his eventual insistence on his own prophethood that signaled what many Muslims continue to interpret as an irreparable break from Islamic tradition.

Ghulam Ahmad’s claims to special spiritual standing were complex and multilayered. Most importantly, he argued that he was the embodiment of two eschatological figures, the Promised Messiah and the mahdi, and he claimed that in being so, he was a prophet. Ghulam Ahmad’s claim to prophethood has aroused enormous ire within the Muslim world because it is seen to contradict the notion that Muhammad is the seal of the prophets. This phrase is taken from the Qur’an (33:40) and is generally understood to imply that Muhammad was the final prophet of all time. Consequently, any claimant to prophethood after Muhammad must necessarily be a false pretender, delusional, or both. Ghulam Ahmad, however, argued that his prophethood was completely consistent with Muhammad being the seal of the prophets.¹⁵ Ghulam Ahmad applied the words nabi (prophet) and rasul (messenger) to himself and even wrote a pamphlet to clear up misconceptions among his followers that he might not be claiming to do so.¹⁶ For Ghulam Ahmad, there was no great theological distinction between nabi and rasul. He argued that the important difference instead lay between law-bearing prophets and non-law-bearing prophets. By this, he meant those prophets who bring a sharia and those who do not. This is where his interpretation of “seal” differs from Sunni Muslims. Ghulam Ahmad understood seal to mean that Muhammad was the most perfect of prophets, that it was only by following Muhammad that anybody else could achieve subsequent prophethood, and that Muhammad was the final prophet to bring a sharia, or divine law, to the world. In other words, Muhammad was the last law-bearing prophet, whereas he, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, brought no new law. Ghulam Ahmad thus claimed to be a prophet, but a very specific kind of prophet. He was a prophet without his own sharia, for he attained his own prophethood only by his absolute faithfulness to the sharia of Muhammad. His prophethood was thus a “shadow” (zill) of Muhammad’s. In making this claim, he was arguing that Muhammad’s status as the seal of the prophets meant that all doors to prophethood have been closed bar one: the annihilation (fana’) of the self in the Prophet Muhammad.¹⁷ Only in absolutely loosing himself in his devotion to the Prophet could Ghulam Ahmad thus attain prophethood, and not, he was careful to maintain, by way of any personal attribute. Ghulam Ahmad’s identification with the Prophet Muhammad was thus a result of his becoming a buruz, or manifestation of the latter.¹⁸ For many opponents, this was not just an act of self-aggrandizement but also a dangerous theological move, for they argue that Ghulam Ahmad’s position ultimately implies that the perfection of Muhammad’s prophethood was dependent on Ghulam Ahmad achieving this status.¹⁹

Ghulam Ahmad’s claim to prophethood has dominated academic discussion of the Ahmadiyya Jama‘at, and the protection (or defense) of the finality of prophethood continues to be the major focus of anti-Ahmadiyya activity in Pakistan. Ghulam Ahmad’s claim to prophethood was nonetheless a secondary result of his claim to be the Promised Messiah, which to this day remains far more important for his modern followers in Qadian. There, he is almost always referred to as simply the Promised Messiah (Masih Mau‘od). Ahmad’s other major claim was to have been the mahdi. There have been, and still are, many claimants to this title; at one point, Iran reportedly had three thousand mahdis in jail.²⁰ Literally meaning “the guided one,” the mahdi is expected to come at the end of days and fight the Antichrist, or dajjal. A commonly cited hadith reports that the mahdi “will break the cross, kill the swine, and abolish war.”²¹ Ghulam Ahmad stripped this hadith of its apocalyptic and violent dimensions and instead interpreted it to mean that as mahdi, he would be victorious over the Christian belief in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Thus, Ghulam Ahmad wrote, “the creed of the cross would come to an end and complete its life span, not through war or violence, but exclusively through heavenly causes, in the form of scientific reason and argument.”²²

My goal is not to probe the claims of Ghulam Ahmad in greater depth. Other scholars, particularly Yohanan Friedmann and Adil Hussain Khan, have done so in remarkably comprehensive detail.²³ Rather, in the remainder of this section, I highlight aspects of Ghulam Ahmad’s argumentative style that remain important to the possibilities and aspirations of ethical life in contemporary Qadian. A number of historians have shown how interreligious debates between reform groups in colonial Punjab led to new forms of communal identity and new kinds of public.²⁴ In studies of the Jama‘at, what has been less remarked on is the fact that to this day, Ahmadis continue to draw on an almost mythological reading of nineteenth-century Punjab as a place of disputation in which Ghulam Ahmad stood alone as an all-conquering polemicist. As a result, for Qadian’s contemporary population, Ghulam Ahmad’s celebrated status as a polemicist continues to create specific possibilities for being Muslim. Most importantly, Ghulam Ahmad’s claims and his style of argument paved the way for a particular understanding of exemplary action in the modern Jama‘at.

In order to justify his prophethood in a combative culture of disputation, Ahmad developed an extraordinarily rich theology of proofs. To this day, these proofs constitute the arsenal of arguments deployed by Ahmadi missionaries in their disputes with opponents, and the glorious efficiency of these arguments in silencing hostile challenges is much lauded among Qadian’s Ahmadis. One of the most remarkable features of these proofs is the centrality of the figure of Jesus (Isa) to Ghulam Ahmad’s attempts to conclusively disprove both Christianity and other forms of Islam. Indeed, Ahmad’s own claim to be the Promised Messiah is dependent on his historical thesis that Jesus died not on the cross but of a natural death in Kashmir. This thesis is most clearly laid out in Ahmad’s treatise of 1899, Masih Hindustan Main, or Jesus in India.²⁵ The book describes in detail how Jesus could not have died on the cross, for to do so would be an accursed death. Instead, Ghulam Ahmad argues that Jesus was crucified for only two hours, before being taken down and healed, so that he could subsequently travel east to continue his work of ministering to the lost tribes of Israel. In the course of Jesus’s search for these scattered tribes, he traveled through present-day Afghanistan and Punjab and arrived in Kashmir, where he died at the age of 120. Ghulam Ahmad further speculated that Jesus may have traveled as far as Tibet, Nepal, and even Varanasi. Ghulam Ahmad was not the first to suggest that Jesus traveled to Asia: he based his work on preexisting ideas about Jesus’s lost years in India. He was, however, the first to propose that Jesus traveled to India after the crucifixion.

To understand why Ahmadis see this argument as obliterating any opposition to Ghulam Ahmad’s prophethood, we need to first understand mainstream Muslim ideas about Jesus. Jesus is mentioned in multiple places in the Qur’an and is understood by all Muslims to be a prophet. There is a tradition, accepted by most Muslims, that Jesus did not die on the cross but was instead taken up to heaven by God, where he awaits the end of days.²⁶ When Ahmad was engaging in his polemical defense of Islam in colonial Punjab, these widespread ideas about Jesus made it extremely hard for Muslims to defend themselves against Christian missionaries’ arguments that a living Jesus, as compared to a dead Muhammad, proved the superiority of Christianity over Islam.²⁷ In the single act of proving that Jesus died a natural death, Ahmad saw himself as achieving multiple victories over his opponents. First, he disproved the Christian notion of the resurrection and thus the divinity of Christ. In doing so, he provided evidence for the Muslim notion that Jesus was merely a prophet of God, not God’s son. Second, he disproved the disquieting notion that Jesus, a prophet o...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Note on Names and Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. The History of the Ahmadi-Caliph Relationship
• 2. An Enchanting Bureaucracy
• 3. A Failure to Doubt?
• 4. Prayer Duels to the Death
• 5. Televising Islam
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index