The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community is established by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in Qadian, British India.

Mirz Ghulm Ahmad (13 February 1835 26 May 1908) was an Indian religious leader and the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement in Islam. He claimed to have been divinely appointed as the promised Messiah and Mahdiwhich is the metaphorical second-coming of Jesus (mathl-iIs), in fulfillment of Islam's latter day prophecies, as well as the Mujaddid (centennial reviver) of the 14th Islamic century.Born to a family with aristocratic roots in Qadian, rural Punjab, Ghulam Ahmad emerged as a writer and debater for Islam. When he was just over forty years of age, his father died and around that time he believed that God began to communicate with him. In 1889, he took a pledge of allegiance from forty of his supporters at Ludhiana and formed a community of followers upon what he claimed was divine instruction, stipulating ten conditions of initiation, an event that marks the establishment of the Ahmadiyya movement. The mission of the movement, according to him, was the reinstatement of the absolute oneness of God, the revival of Islam through the moral reformation of society along Islamic ideals, and the global propagation of Islam in its pristine form. As opposed to the Christian and mainstream Islamic view of Jesus (or Isa), being alive in heaven to return towards the end of time, Ghulam Ahmad asserted that he had in fact survived crucifixion and died a natural death. He traveled extensively across the Punjab preaching his religious ideas and rallied support by combining a reformist programme with his personal revelations which he claimed to receive from God, attracting thereby substantial following within his lifetime as well as considerable hostility particularly from the Muslim Ulema. He is known to have engaged in numerous public debates and dialogues with Christian missionaries, Muslim scholars and Hindu revivalists.

Ghulam Ahmad was a prolific author and wrote more than ninety books on various religious, theological and moral subjects between the publication of the first volume of Barahin-i-Ahmadiyya (The Proofs of Ahmadiyya, his first major work) in 1880 and his death in May 1908. Many of his writings bear a polemical and apologetic tone in favour of Islam, seeking to establish its superiority as a religion through rational argumentation, often by articulating his own interpretations of Islamic teachings. He advocated a peaceful propagation of Islam and emphatically argued against the permissibility of military Jihad under circumstances prevailing in the present age. By the time of his death, he had gathered an estimated 400,000 followers, especially within the United Provinces, the Punjab and Sindh and had built a dynamic religious organisation with an executive body and its own printing press. After his death he was succeeded by his close companion Hakm Noor-ud-Dn who assumed the title of Khalfatul Mash (successor of the Messiah).

Although Ghulam Ahmad is revered by Ahmadi Muslims as the promised Messiah and Imm Mahdi, Muhammad nevertheless remains the central figure in Ahmadiyya Islam. Ghulam Ahmad's claim to be a subordinate (ummati) prophet within Islam has remained a central point of controversy between his followers and mainstream Muslims, who believe Muhammad to be the last prophet.

Ahmadiyya (, also UK: ), officially the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community or the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at (Arabic: الجماعة الإسلامية الأحمدية, romanized: al-Jamāʿah al-Islāmīyah al-Aḥmadīyah; Urdu: جماعت احمدیہ مسلمہ, romanized: Jamā'at Aḥmadiyyah Muslimah), is an Islamic revival or messianic movement originating in Punjab, British India, in the late 19th century. It was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), who claimed to have been divinely appointed as both the Promised Mahdi (Guided One) and Messiah expected by Muslims to appear towards the end times and bring about, by peaceful means, the final triumph of Islam; as well as to embody, in this capacity, the expected eschatological figure of other major religious traditions. Adherents of the Ahmadiyya—a term adopted expressly in reference to Muhammad's alternative name Aḥmad—are known as Ahmadi Muslims or simply Ahmadis.

Ahmadi thought emphasizes the belief that Islam is the final dispensation for humanity as revealed to Muhammad and the necessity of restoring it to its true intent and pristine form, which had been lost through the centuries. Its adherents consider Ahmad to have appeared as the Mahdi—bearing the qualities of Jesus in accordance with their reading of scriptural prophecies—to revitalize Islam and set in motion its moral system that would bring about lasting peace. They believe that upon divine guidance he purged Islam of foreign accretions in belief and practice by championing what is, in their view, Islam's original precepts as practised by Muhammad and the early Muslim community. Ahmadis thus view themselves as leading the propagation and renaissance of Islam.Mirza Ghulam Ahmad established the Community (or Jamāʿat) on 23 March 1889 by formally accepting allegiance from his supporters. Since his death, the Community has been led by a succession of Caliphs. By 2017 it had spread to 210 countries and territories of the world with concentrations in South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and Indonesia. The Ahmadis have a strong missionary tradition, having formed the first Muslim missionary organization to arrive in Britain and other Western countries. Currently, the community is led by its caliph, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, and is estimated to number between 10 and 20 million worldwide.The movement is almost entirely a single, highly organized group. However, in the early history of the community, some Ahmadis dissented over the nature of Ahmad's prophetic status and succession. They formed the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement, which has since dwindled to a small fraction of all Ahmadis. Ahmadiyya's recognition of Ahmad as a prophet has been characterized as heretical by mainstream Muslims, who believe that Muhammed was the final prophet, and the Ahmadi movement has faced non-recognition and persecution in many parts of the world. The term Qādiyānī is used pejoratively to refer to the movement.