Hazrat Maulvi Nooruddin - Khalifatul-Masih I — Page ix
ix FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the Promised Messiah as and Mahdi, Founder of the Ahmadiyya Movement as died, after an illness extending over a few hours, at Lahore, on May 26, 1908. He had received repeated warnings of his fast approaching end, in the divine revelations vouchsafed to him, over a period of weeks. Nevertheless, the impact of the event, when it happened, on the members of the Movement, was shattering. His bitter opponents breathed a sigh of relief, and the more virulent ones expressed unseemly jubilation, that a grave threat to some of their cherished beliefs and doctrines, and the way of life to which they had become addicted, had at last been removed. They conceived that the Movement founded by him would soon pass into the limbo of history, and would be forgotten as an inconsequent ripple on the surface of orthodox Islam. The sober minded among the Muslims, though not endorsing his claims, felt bereaved of a great champion of Islam, whose death was an irreparable loss. Even non-Muslims acknowledged and paid tribute to his high scholarship, utter sincerity, and the purity and righteousness of his life. At that fateful hour in the history of the Movement, of Islam, of religion and of mankind, before his sacred remains were reverently committed to the earth at Qadian, on May 27, his foremost and most devoted disciple, Hadrat Maulaw i N u r-ud-D i n ra , an