Mirzā Ghulām 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
Mahdi, in the likeness of Jesus (
mathīl-iʿIsā), in fulfilment of Islam's
eschatological prophecies, as well as the
Mujaddid (renewer) of Islam. In 1888, he announced that he had been divinely instructed to take a
pledge of allegiance from his supporters and form a community and stipulated
ten conditions of initiation, taking the pledge at
Ludhiana from about forty of his supporters on 23 March 1889. An event that marks the formal establishment of the Ahmadiyya movement. The mission of the movement, according to him, was the revival of Islam through the moral reformation of society along Islamic ideals, and the global propagation of Islam in its pristine form.