Summary

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and the early Ahmadiyya movement were a missing link in the narrative of American religious culture’s opening to Islam in the 20th century. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s 1880 Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya provided a comprehensive Islamic challenge to Christian missionaries in India and Western religious scholars of Islam. In 1886, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad began publishing translated segments of Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya in American Henry Olcott’s Theosophist magazine to reach a wider English-speaking readership. In 1887, Ahmad began direct correspondence with Alexander Russell Webb, an American Theosophist. These early engagements of Ghulam Ahmad with the English-speaking public preceded the formal establishment of the messianic Ahmadiyya movement in British India in 1889. Ahmad’s 1880–1893 intellectual activism paved the ground for the emergence of Muhammad Alexander Russell Webb as the Muslim American representative at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions. Close examination is also given to the English-language Ahmadiyya journal, the Review of Religions, whose 1902 founding built upon a twenty-year literary engagement of Ghulam Ahmad with American religious thinkers. Both the Ahmadiyya movement and the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islamiyya continued to introduce Islam and Ahmad’s writings to English-speaking populations in North America and Europe in the decades after his death. As a result, the history of Islamic religious movements in the United States between 1890 and 1940 is dominated by the literature and leadership of Ghulam Ahmad and his followers. This research makes the case that Ahmad and his early supporters’ engagement with American religious society in the late 19th century should form the starting point for scholars attempting to understand how Islam developed in the United States.