Tadhkirah — Page vii
Foreword to the First English Edition This volume presents an English rendering of the dreams, visions and verbal revelations vouchsafed to Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the Promised Messiah and Mahdi, over a period of more than 30 years. The original was compiled from various publications (books, journals and newspapers) in which the material was contemporaneously publicised. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born in February 1835 at Qadian, India and died at Lahore on May 26 th 1908. He was a scion of a noble family which had been settled in Qadian for 400 years. From his childhood he had been devoted to spiritual values and had an innate antipathy towards worldly concerns. In compliance with his father’s wishes he took up a minor administrative appointment in his younger days but soon abandoned it and returned to his life of religious study and devotion. Off and on, under his father’s directions, he would proceed upon an errand of a temporal character but derived no satisfaction from it. His father perceiving his strong bent towards matters spiritual gave up the attempt to persuade him to interest himself in a worldly career. A deep study of the Holy Quran, a passionate devotion to the Holy Prophet of Islam (peace be on him) and a constant pre-occupation with divine worship and prayer became the pattern of his life. He was much distressed at observing the indifference of the Muslims towards the moral and spiritual values inculcated by the Holy Quran and was deeply pained by the attacks of non-Muslim propagandists against the doctrines and teachings of Islam. He found that the Christian missionaries of the time put themselves in the vanguard of those elements which were