Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement

Members of the Lahore Ahmadiyya movement are referred to by the majority group as ghayr mubāyi'īn[1] ("non-initiates"; "those outside of allegiance" to the caliph) and are also known colloquially as Lahori Ahmadis.

[5][6][7] According to estimates from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada and author Simon Ross Valentine, there are between 5,000 and 10,000 Lahori Ahmadis in Pakistan[8] and as many as 30,000 worldwide,[9] thereby representing less than 0.2% of the total Ahmadiyya population.

However, a group, which included some of the movement's senior figures, led by Maulana Muhammad Ali, opposed his succession and refrained from pledging their allegiance to him, eventually leaving Qadian and relocating to Lahore.

Adopting a position more congruent with the mainstream of Sunni Islam regarding the issues of dispute, Muhammad Ali led the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement as Amīr (President) from 1914 until his death in 1951.

[25][26] The former could not in any sense be termed disbelievers (kafirs) while the latter were guilty only of rejecting a particular commandment of the Islamic faith—namely that pertaining to belief in the promised Messiah—which would render them fasiqun (those who depart from the right path) in distinction to disbelief in a basic element of the faith which would have excluded them from the Muslim community (Ummah).

[41][39] No individual had the power to revoke the decisions reached by the majority of the Council that would remain paramount and binding,[42] something which they believed was in keeping with Ghulam Ahmad's instructions for the movement's administration after his death.

Further, according to them, since leadership of the movement was no longer divinely appointed after Ghulam Ahmad's death, the obligation to pledge allegiance to his successor had also lapsed and had become a voluntary act.

[42] This, he contended, was clearly indicated in The Will as well as Ghulam Ahmad's other works and was an arrangement which, according to him, had existed throughout the period of Nur-ud-Din's leadership who not only spoke of himself as the khalīfat al-masīh (caliph; lit.

[46][47] While the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community holds the view that Jesus born of the virgin Mary is a fundamental belief in Islam,[48] many pioneer and prominent Lahori Ahmadi Muslims deny that the virgin birth indeed occurred and stated that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had no issues with his followers holding different opinions on such matters [49] Reliable statistics on the worldwide Lahore Ahmadiyya movement do not exist.