The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who in 1889 in Qadian, in what is now Indian Punjab, claimed to be the promised Messiah and Mahdi anticipated in Islamic eschatology, a claim rejected by the great majority of the wider Muslim world, which regards the finality of Muhammad's prophethood as foundational and has in several countries formally excluded Ahmadis from being recognized as Muslims. On Ghulam Ahmad's death in 1908, his companions elected Hakim Nur-ud-Din as the first Khalifatul Masih, establishing an elected caliphate as the community's ongoing leadership structure, distinct from the hereditary and reincarnation-based successions found in several other lineage offices in this record.
The movement split in 1914 over questions of the founder's prophetic status and the nature of the caliphate, producing the larger Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which retained the khilafat, and the smaller Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement, which rejected a continuing caliphate in favor of a rotating leadership. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community's khilafat has continued since 1908, relocating its center from Qadian to London after the 1947 partition of India made the community's position in Pakistan increasingly difficult and, later, actively restricted.