The Seal of the Prophets: Khatam an-Nabiyyin in Q 33:40

In March 1889, in a house in Ludhiana, about forty people took the hand of a fifty-four-year-old man from a small Punjabi town called Qadian and pledged him their allegiance. His name was Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Until that afternoon he had been known, when he was known at all, as an unusually combative defender of Islam. He had spent the 1880s writing against Christian missionaries and against the Arya Samaj, and the first volumes of his Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya (1880–1884) had been received warmly by Muslim scholars who saw in him a useful polemicist for a community under pressure.

Nineteen years later he died with a following in the tens of thousands and a reputation, among the great majority of Muslims, as the most consequential heretic South Asian Islam had produced.

What happened in between is worth setting out precisely, because most of what is said about it on both sides is said carelessly.