Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Zainab al-Ghazali, Return of the Pha-

raoh: Memoirs in Nasir’s Prison. Translated by Mokran 

Guezzou (Broughton Gifford, U.K.: Cromwell Press, 

1994); Valerie J. Hoffman, “An Islamist Activist: Zaynab 

al-Ghazali.” In Women and the Family in the Middle East, 

edited by Elisabeth Warnock Fernea, 233–254 (Austin: 

University of Texas Press, 1985); Saba Mahmood, Poli-

tics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Ghulam Ahmad

 

(ca. 1830–1908)  the self-

proclaimed Mahdi and founder of the Ahmadiyya 

movement of Islam in colonial India

Ghulam Ahmad, also called Mirza Ghulam Ahmad 

Qadiani, founded an Islamic missionary revival 

movement in British i

ndia

 known as the a

hmadi

-

yya

 in 1889. He came from a prosperous family of 

Sunni Muslim landowners in the small town of 

Qadian in the Punjab region of northern India. He 

received a good 

edUcation

 but resisted his father’s 

wishes that he become a lawyer or work for the 

British colonial government. Instead, Ghulam 

Ahmad pursued a religious life—for a period of 

about 20 years he claimed to receive revelations 

from God, and through his writings and mission-

ary efforts he attracted a following that grew to 

about 20,000 members by the time of his death 

in 1908.

At the end of the 19th century, several Muslim 

empires were coming to an end. Muslim lands 

were increasingly falling under the direct or indi-

rect control of European colonial powers, and 

Christian missionaries from Europe were seeking 

converts among Muslims. Ghulam Ahmad was 

among those Muslims who felt that their religion 

needed to be revived and reformed in order to sur-

vive. He saw himself as “the light of this dark age,” 

a “rightly guided one” (m

ahdi

), and the peace-

ful renewer of the religion, who was expected to 

appear at the beginning of the 14th century on the 

Islamic 

calendar

 (1300 A.H. coincided with 1882 

on the Western calendar). His followers, especially 

the Qadiani branch of the Ahmadiyya move-

ment, also think that Ghulam Ahmad claimed 

to be a 

prophet

, which has offended other Mus-

lims because a central Islamic belief is that there 

can be no prophets after m

Uhammad

 (d. 632). 

In response to this criticism, the Qadianis have 

argued that there are two kinds of prophet: those 

who bring God’s law and those who make it work.