Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam — Page 5
5 History of the Movement The Ahmadiyya Movement was founded by H a d- rat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as (1835-1908), in March 1889, when he was about 54 years of age. Ahmad as belonged to a noble and ancient Mughal family of the Punjab which had migrated to India from Samarkand in or about the reign of the Emperor Babar. The first ancestor of Ahmad as to come to India was Mirza H a d i Baig who, says Sir Lepel Griffin in his Punjab Chiefs , 'was appointed Qazi or Magistrate over seventy villages in the neighbourhood of Qadian which town he is said to have founded, naming it Islam- pur Qazi from which Qadian has, by a natural change, arisen. For several generations the family held offices of respectability under the Imperial Government and it was only when the Sikhs be- came powerful that it fell into poverty. ' The headquarters of the Movement were estab- lished by Ahmad as at Qadian, a small town in the Punjab (India), to which he belonged, and which is situated at a distance of about 11 miles to the north east of Batala, a railway station on the N. W. R. system. In spite of the violent opposition offered to him by the followers of every religion in India and the unsympathetic attitude of the Government officials towards him in the beginning, the Movement founded by him continued to make steady progress in all parts of India, so that at the time of his death, which occurred in May 1908, his followers