The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement Blog

Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi on Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad defeating Christian missionaries

A quotation from the preface to the Urdu translation of the Holy Quran by Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, published in 1934, occurs in our literature. When translating the book 'The Death of Jesus' by the learned Maulana Hafiz Sher Muhammad, I translated this quotation as follows:

"In that period, Bishop Lefroy gathered an army of missionaries and left England, promising that he would soon convert the whole of India to Christianity. Having collected a great amount of money from the people of England, and assurances from them of continuing assistance in the future, he entered India and raised a big storm. His attack on the teachings of Islam was a failure … But the attack based on the argument that Jesus was alive in heaven in his physical body, while all other prophets were buried in the earth, was in his view proving to be effective upon the general public. At that juncture, Maulvi Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani stood up and addressed Lefroy and his group, saying: ‘The Jesus you talk about is dead and buried like other mortals, and the Jesus whose coming is prophesied is myself, so you must accept me.’ By this means he made things so difficult for Lefroy that he could not shake him off. In this way, he defeated all the Christian missionaries from India to England." (page 30)

Recently I came across a copy of that Urdu translation of the Holy Quran by Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi at the home of a friend in Suriname. I immediately had the relevant page scanned, and also some pages around it. You can read this passage in the original book at this link.

For greater context you can read pages 29-31 at this link.

Dealing with the history of Islam in India, the point he is raising is that, in his opinion, in modern times four men present "a bad example" of distorting Islamic teachings and causing sectarian rifts. These are the following:

1. Maulana Nazir Husain of Delhi, the founder of the Ahl-i Hadith sect. He is condemned by Thanvi for rejecting the four schools of Fiqh.
2. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. He is condemned for his rationalist interpretations of the Quran.
3. Maulvi Abdullah Chakralvi, founder of the Ahl-i Quran tendency, who rejected all Hadith reports.
4. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.

After the extract quoted above, Ashraf Ali Thanvi writes that it was merely a ploy by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad against Christian missionaries to say that ‘The Jesus you talk about is dead and buried like other mortals, and the Jesus whose coming is prophesied is myself'. Having used this ploy, writes Thanvi, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was now stuck with adopting this as his actual belief, because he could not retract it: "Therefore till his death he adhered to this belief and kept on giving inappropriate interpretations of the Quran and Hadith".

He adds: "These four men have now died and have gone to the next world. The intention with which they did this work is known to Allah, and their accounting is with Him. But due to them it happened that ignorant Muslims were needlessly divided into factions. We wish these men had not done this, because it is possible to reply to your opponents while still maintaining the true beliefs…"

It is clear that Ashraf Ali Thanvi places Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in the same category as the other three men, as regards the rights and wrongs of what they were trying to do. He does not consider them as unbelievers and kafir, but as persons who tried to defend Islam although in the wrong way. Thanvi certainly does not say that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed to be a prophet and thereby went out of Islam.