In 1889, he took a pledge of allegiance from forty of his supporters at Ludhiana and formed a community of followers upon what he claimed was divine instruction, stipulating ten conditions of initiation, an event that marks the establishment of the Ahmadiyya movement.

As opposed to the Christian and mainstream Islamic view of Jesus (or Isa), being alive in heaven to return towards the end of time, Ahmad asserted that he had in fact survived crucifixion and died a natural death.

He traveled extensively across the Punjab preaching his religious ideas and rallied support by combining a reformist programme with his personal revelations which he claimed to receive from God, attracting thereby substantial following within his lifetime as well as considerable hostility particularly from the Muslim Ulama.

Ahmad was a prolific author and wrote more than ninety books on various religious, theological and moral subjects between the publication of the first volume of Barahin-i-Ahmadiyya (The Proofs of Ahmadiyya, his first major work) in 1880 and his death in May 1908.

By the time of his death, he had gathered an estimated 400,000 followers, especially within the United Provinces, the Punjab and Sindh and had built a dynamic religious organisation with an executive body and its own printing press.

Although Ahmad is revered by Ahmadi Muslims as the promised Messiah and Imām Mahdi, Muhammad nevertheless remains the central figure in Ahmadiyya Islam.

[3] In 1530, Mirza Hadi Beg migrated from Samarkand[4] (present-day Uzbekistan) along with an entourage of two hundred people consisting of his family, servants and followers.

[5][6][7] Travelling through Samarkand, they finally settled in the Punjab, India, where Mirza Hadi founded the town known today as Qadian during the reign of Emperor Babur,[7] his distant relative.

Mirza Hadi Beg was granted a Jagir of several hundred villages and was appointed the Qadi (judge) of Qadian and the surrounding district.

[37] Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, by contrast, asserted that Jesus had in fact survived crucifixion and died of old age much later in Kashmir, where he had migrated.

[40][41][42] Mirza Ghulam Ahmad wrote two books named Tuhfa-e-Qaiseriya and Sitara-e-Qaiseriya in which he invited Queen Victoria to embrace Islam and forsake Christianity.

Following his claim to be the Promised Messiah and Mahdi, one of his adversaries prepared a Fatwa (decree) of disbelief against Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, declaring him a Kafir (disbeliever), a deceiver, and a liar.

The unanimous consensus of about thirty-four religious scholars was that Ahmad's beliefs were blasphemous and tantamount to apostasy and that he must be punished by imprisonment and, if necessary, by execution.

Eventually, it was settled, and Ahmad travelled to the Jama Masjid (main mosque) of Delhi accompanied by twelve of his followers, where some 5,000 people were gathered.

Seeing that the crowd was drifting out of control and that violence was imminent, the police superintendent gave orders to disperse the audience, and the debate did not take place.

A few days later, however, a written debate did take place between Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and Maulwi Muhammad Bashir of Bhopal, which was later published.

[citation needed] Scientific historical records indicate these eclipses occurred at the following dates: In 1897, a Christian missionary, Henry Martyn Clark, filed a lawsuit of attempted murder against Ahmad at the court of District Magistrate Captain Montagu William Douglas in the city of Ludhiana.

[54][55][better source needed] In 1900, on the occasion of the festival of Eid ul-Adha, he is said to have delivered an hour-long sermon extempore in Arabic expounding the meaning and philosophy of sacrifice.

Instead he should keep me alone in his mind and pray that if one of us is fabricating a lie, he should die before the other.Dowie declined the challenge,[59] calling Mirza Ghulam Ahmad the "silly Mohammedan Messiah".

The Dictionary of American Biography states that after having been deposed during a revolt in which his own family was involved, Dowie endeavoured to recover his authority via the law courts without success and that he may have been a victim of some form of mania, as he suffered from hallucinations during his last illness.

[61] Mirza Ghulam Ahmad wrote to Smyth-Pigott, informing him that such a blasphemous proposition did not behove man, and that in the future he should abstain from making such claims, or he would be destroyed.

[citation needed] Despite this prophecy, Smyth-Piggot continued to claim divinity both before and after Mirza Ghulam's death in 1908, as reported by various contemporary newspapers at the time.

A banquet was arranged for dignitaries where Ahmad, upon request, spoke for some two hours explaining his claims, teachings and speaking in refutation of objections raised against his person; here, he preached reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims.

[75][76] Many leading Muslim scholars, theologians and prominent journalists who were his contemporaries or had come into contact with him, had, despite differing with him in matters of belief, praised his personal character and acclaimed his works in the cause of Islam and the manner of his argumentation against proclaimants of other religions.

Furthermore, some Islamic scholars have opined that Jesus has died (Ahmad's assertion) or have expressed their own confusion on this matter,[90][91][92][93][94][95] though the majority orthodox position of most Muslims with regard to this issue has not changed.

One of the main sources of dispute during his lifetime and continuing since then is Ahmad's use of the terms nabi ("prophet") and rasul ("messenger") when referring to himself.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which comprises by far the majority of Ahmadis, believes that Ahmad's prophetic status does not in any way infringe the finality of Muhammad's prophethood – to which it is wholly subservient and from which it is inseparable – and is in accordance with scriptural prophecies concerning the advent of the Messiah in Islam.

[98] Pakistan is the only state that specifically requires every Pakistani Muslim to denigrate Ahmad as an impostor and his followers as non-Muslims when applying for a passport or a national ID card.