Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad

Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad ( ur, ) (12 January 1889 – 8 November 1965), was the second caliph ( ar, خليفة المسيح الثاني, ''khalīfatul masīh al-thāni''), leader of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and the eldest son of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad from his second wife, Nusrat Jahan Begum. He was elected as the second successor of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad on 14 March 1914 at the age of 25, the day after the death of his predecessor Hakim Nur-ud-Din.

Mahmood Ahmad's election as second caliph saw a secession within the movement in which a party refrained from pledging allegiance to him on account of certain differences over succession and theology; and possibly owing to a clash of personalities. He led the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community for over half a century and is known for establishing virtually the entire organisational structure of the Community (including five Auxiliary Organisations), improvement of its administration, formally establishing the ''Majlis al-Shura'' (Consultative Council), consolidating and formalising the system of financial contributions of the Community and directing extensive missionary activity beyond the Indian subcontinent. He is also known for his ''Tafsīr-e-Kabīr'', a ten-volume exegesis of the Qur'an. A renowned orator, Mahmood Ahmad was also an active political figure especially in pre-independence India. He was also one of the founding members and the first president of the All India Kashmir Committee set up for the establishment of the civil rights of Kashmiri Muslims. Following the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, he carefully oversaw the safe migration of Ahmadis from Qadian to the newly found state, eventually building a town on a tract of arid and mountainous land bought by the Community in 1948 which now became its new headquarters and was named Rabwah. A 26 volume compilation of his works called ''Anwārul Uloom'' contains over 800 writings and lectures (excluding the many thousands of sermons). Mahmood Ahmad is regarded by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community as the ''Musleh Ma'ood'' (Promised Reformer) and the "Promised Son" that Ghulam Ahmad foretold God would bestow upon him.

Early life

Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood was born to Ghulam Ahmad and Nusrat Jahan Begum on 12 January 1889 in Qadian, the same year in which Ghulam Ahmad established the Ahmadiyya Movement by accepting allegiance from his disciples. Due to chronic illness Mahmood Ahmad was unable to attend to secondary education. During his youth, he remained an active member in the service of the Movement by founding a journal entitled ''Tash'heezul Az'haan'' and accompanied his father on many of his journeys. On 26 May 1908, Ghulam Ahmad died in Lahore when Mahmood Ahmad was 19 years old. The next day on 27 May 1908, he gave the pledged allegiance to Hakeem Noor-ud-Din, who had been chosen to succeed Ghulam Ahmad. After the passing of his father, Mahmood Ahmad continued to study the Quran, Sahih Bukhari, the Masnavi and some medicine under the tutelage of Noor-ud-Din, with whom he developed a close friendship. Noor-ud-Din would eventually become one of the leading influences in Mahmood's life. He also began writing articles for various periodicals for the Community and would often engage himself in theological debates with various scholars of the Community. Mahmood Ahmad visited Egypt and Arabia in September 1912 during the course of which he performed the Hajj pilgrimage. Upon his return to Qadian in June 1913, he started a newspaper, titled '' Al-Fazl''. Within the Community, the newspaper serves as a vehicle for the moral upbringing of its members, Islamic education and preservation of the Community's history.

Caliphate

On 13 March 1914, Khalifatul Masih I Hakeem Noor-ud-Din died shortly after 2 p.m. in Qadian, India. The following day, Noor-ud-Din's will which had been entrusted to Muhammad Ali Khan, a prominent member of the Community, was read aloud in Noor Mosque after Asr prayer. Having hardly finished the reading of Noor-ud-Din's will, members of the community felt Mahmood Ahmad best met the criteria of a successor the will had described and began calling for Mahmood Ahmad to accept their Bai'at (oath of allegiance). Being unprepared, he turned to Maulvi Syed Sarwar Shah and said "Maulvi Sahib, this burden has fallen upon me suddenly and unexpectedly and I cannot even recall the formula of Bai'at. Will you kindly instruct me in it?". He took the Bai'at of those present, repeating the words after Sawar Shah. After the oath was taken, he offered a silent prayer and made a brief speech. Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad was elected as Khalifatul Masih II on 14 March 1914. Under his leadership, there was further development of the scope of missionary activities and the establishment of a Madrasa Ahmadiyya up to the university level. During his tenure, he established 46 foreign missions and founded the ''Anjuman Tehrik-e-Jadīd'', which collected the funds from the members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community for the training of missionaries and had them posted to various countries. Mahmood Ahmad also had mosques built in most places where missions had been established. The publication of magazines and periodicals was also initiated in various languages. He also started the translation of the Qur'an into English with a detailed commentary for the benefit of English speaking nations.A Brief History of Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam: Propagation of Islam
Alislam.org. Retrieved on 2021-07-08.

The Split

Soon after Hakim Nur-ud-Din's death in 1914, pre-existing ideological and administrative differences between Mahmood Ahmad and other prominent Ahmadi figures came to a head. As a result, a faction, led by Maulana Muhammad Ali, opposed his succession and refrained from pledging their allegiance to him, eventually leaving Qadian and relocating to Lahore, something which led to a veritable secession and the formation of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement. Though a clash of personalities between the dissenters and Mahmood Ahmad has been postulated owing to the latter's relative youth, inexperience and poor academic background, Muhammad Ali and his supporters' differences with him centred mainly upon the nature of Ghulam Ahmad's prophethood—and consequentially the status of Muslims who did not accept him—as well as the form the leadership should take within the movement, viz. the relative authority of the caliph and the ''Anjuman'' (executive council).

On prophethood

Ahmadis universally concur in the belief that Ghulam Ahmad was both the promised Mahdi and Messiah foretold by Muhammad to appear in the end times, and that his prophetic qualities were neither independent nor separable from Muhammad's prophetic mission. However, Muhammad Ali held that the type of prophecy described by Ghulam Ahmad in reference to himself did not make him a prophet in the technical sense of the word as used in Islamic terminology, amounted to nothing more than sainthood and that Islamic mystics preceding Ghulam Ahmad had similarly described experiences of prophecy within Islam and in relation to Muhammad. Accordingly, unlike the majority Islamic belief which expects the physical return of Jesus, the Lahore Ahmadiyya affirm the absolute cessation of prophethood, and believe that no prophet can appear after Muhammad, neither a past one like Jesus, nor a new one.

In contrast, Mahmood Ahmad posited that Ghulam Ahmad's messianic claim and role were qualitatively distinct from the claims of the saints preceding him in Islam and that his prophetic status, though completely subservient to Muhammad, being a mere reflection of his own prophethood and not legislating anything new, still made him technically a prophet irrespective of the type of prophethood or the adjectives added to qualify it. Accordingly, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community believes that prophecy gifted as a result of perfect obedience and self-effacement in devotion to Muhammad is theologically possible after him, though it affirms the advent of only one such promised end-times figure in Ghulam Ahmad as having appeared in accordance with scriptural prophecies. Such a prophetic status, though not independent, is nonetheless technically classed as prophethood in as much as it involves an individual who is given knowledge of the hidden, predicts future events and is called a prophet by Allah.

On other Muslims

A closely linked point of contention surrounded the status of Muslims who did not accept Ghulam Ahmad's claim. Muhammad Ali and his supporters, rejecting indiscriminate pronouncements of disbelief ('' Kufr'') concerning them, drew a distinction between those who were neutral in the controversy and those who actively rejected and opposed Ghulam Ahmad, or pronounced him an infidel. 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''). Muhammad Ali repudiated the idea of declaring the entire Muslim community as disbelievers, a term which, according to him, could not apply to non-Ahmadi Muslims indiscriminately, something which he accused Mahmood Ahmad of doing.

Affirming a different typology of disbelief, i.e. that which subsists outside of Islam in contrast to that which does not entail exclusion from it, although Mahmood Ahmad held that Muslims who did not accept Ghulam Ahmad technically fell into the category of disbelief, and that rejection of him ultimately amounted to rejection of Muhammad, he utilised the broad connotations and usages of the Arabic word ''Kafir'' to stress that his use of the term in reference to such Muslims did not carry its demotic meaning, but rather meant to signify doctrinal deviancy and to express that only Ahmadis were ''true'' Muslims. For him, since such Muslims as had not accepted one appointed by God (''ma'mur minallah'') within Islam were neither deniers of God nor Muhammad, they were still part of the Muslim community and were Muslims only in the sense that they belonged to the ''Ummah'' of Muhammad and as such were entitled to be treated as members of Muslim society (''mu'ashira''), which, according to him, was different from saying that they are Muslims and not ''kafirs''. He held, therefore, that non-Ahmadi Muslims were to be classified as disbelievers albeit within the remit of Islam and not in the sense that they had a religion other than Islam; and, further, that the movement passed no judgement as to their fate in the hereafter and never proactively expressed this opinion of them. Although he refused demands from outside the movement to accept that the term ''Kafir'' did not apply to non-Ahmadi Muslims, Mahmood Ahmad did maintain that such Muslims were not deemed to be outside the pale of Islam.

On succession

Towards the end of 1905, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad published a short treatise anticipating his own death entitled ''Al-Wasiyyat'' (or ''The Will'') in which he established the ''Sadr Anjuman Ahmadiyya'' (Central Ahmadiyya Council), an executive body set up to administer the movement and to collect and distribute funds to support the propagation of Islam. Ghulam Ahmad presided over the Council himself until his death in 1908. After his death, Hakim Nur-ud-Din was unanimously chosen to succeed him and presided over the council's appointed president. Muhammad Ali and his supporters held that Ghulam Ahmad, in ''The Will'', had designated the council as a consultative institution to be his successor. Viewing as autocratic the idea of one individual wielding absolute authority within the Community and demanding total obedience from it, they repudiated the idea of a ''khilāfah'' (caliphate) within the movement, preferring what they saw as a more democratic system established by Ghulam Ahmad himself and, accordingly, vested the Community's authority in the council as an administrative body. No individual had the power to revoke the decisions reached by the majority of the Council that would remain paramount and binding, 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.

As opposed to the foregoing approach, Mahmood Ahmad, who assumed the movement's leadership as the second successor the day after Nur-ud-Din's death, held that Ghulam Ahmad had envisioned a system of divinely ordained caliphate to succeed him, similar to that believed to have commenced following the death of Muhammad, under whose authority the council was to operate. Accordingly, he favoured centralised, singular authority through the system of caliphate which, in his view, was religiously indispensable and to which the Community's allegiance was necessary. Ghulam Ahmad's successors, according to him, continued to be divinely ordained and commanded obedience from the Community. 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. successor of the Messiah) but declared that he had attained this office by divine appointment rather than community choice. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, accordingly, vests its religious and organisational authority in the caliph as Ghulam Ahmad's divinely chosen successor.

The non-cooperation movement

Mahmood Ahmad became an important political figure in pre-independence India, and had close contacts with the leadership of All-India Muslim League. In 1919 following the defeat of Turkey during the first world war, which had a profound effect on the Muslims of India, the ''All India Muslim Conference'' was held in Lucknow to discuss Turkey's future existence. Mahmood was invited to attend, but could not attend in person. However, he wrote a booklet, on the subject of ''The future of Turkey and the duty of Muslims'' which was read out at the conference.

Mahmood was usually at variance with the activities of the Khilafat movement which strove to defend the Ottoman Caliphate, sought to pressure the British Government and to protect the Ottoman Empire. The Movement became a major part of the struggle of the Non-cooperation movement

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases