Members of the Ahmadiyya movement affirm that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian (1835-1908), was the Promised Messiah and the Mahdi awaited by Muslims, and, in the community's understanding, a subordinate prophet who brought no new law but revived Islam. They hold that he came to defend the faith by argument rather than the sword and to unite humanity under Islam. The community stresses that it affirms the finality of Muhammad's prophethood while interpreting Ghulam Ahmad's status as prophecy of a reflected, non-law-bearing kind. Ghulam Ahmad took his first pledge of allegiance from followers at Ludhiana in 1889, the date the movement counts as its founding, and developed his claims to be the Promised Messiah and Mahdi through the 1890s.
After his death in 1908 the movement split over exactly how to understand his status: the majority Qadiani branch, now headquartered in London and led by a hereditary caliph (khalifa), holds that Ghulam Ahmad was a true, if subordinate and non-law-bearing, prophet, while the smaller Lahori Ahmadiyya (Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha'at-e-Islam), based in Lahore, holds that he was a reformer (mujaddid) and not a prophet in any sense, a distinction its members regard as essential to remaining fully within mainstream Islamic doctrine on the finality of prophethood.