The Interface of Prophecy and Modernity in the Teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

Islamic Modernism (1840-1940) was a political movement that coincided with the dissolution of Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid empires, and the consolidation of imperial British, French, and Dutch rule.  The intellectual pioneers who were the first reconcile the Islamic faith with modern western values such as education, progress, democracy, and Protestant Christianity included the Iranian Jamal al-Din Afghani (d. 1897), the Egyptians Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), and Rashid Rida (d. 1935), and Indians Syed Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938). Despite the fact that the modernists were situated in contexts as diverse as Iran, India, and Egypt, their political and religious ideas about Islam were all shaped, in some way, by colonial and Protestant perspectives of 18^th and 19^th century European Orientalists and missionaries. This paper explores the writings of a key modernist thinker whose work rarely appears in histories of the Muslim modernist movement, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d.1908), the founder of the Ahmadiya Muslim community. Modernist Muslims as well as later accounts of the modernist movement have dismissed Ahmad’s contribution to modernist Muslim thought because of the controversial nature of his proclamations, most notably, the pronouncement that he was the new prophet of Islam. This paper examines Ahmad’s writings on prophecy, specifically how they illustrate an expansive and productive synthesis of Muslim devotional and colonial modern conceptions of religion—a line of thinking that has been occluded in standard narratives about the modernist movement and the place Muslim reform in the historical trajectory of secular enlightenment.