BANNER NEAR A LOCAL MUSLIM CHURCH or MOSQUE in Zion, IL
- “Dozens of complaints have been launched over an Islamic advertising campaign claiming the 'Messiah has come'.” “Launched by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a heavily persecuted minority Muslim sect, a series of billboards in London, Manchester and Glasgow aim to promote the idea, considered heretical by mainstream Islam, that the Messiah promised in the Qur'an has already come in the person of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.” - “Mirzā Ghulām Ahmad (13 February 1835 – 26 May 1908) was an Indian religious leader and founder of the Ahmadiyya movement in Islam. He claimed to have been divinely appointed as the promised Messiah and Mahdi—which is the metaphorical 2nd coming of Jesus in fulfillment of Islam's latter day prophecies, as well as the Mujaddid (centennial reviver) of the 14th Islamic century. Born in 1835 to a Rais family in Qadian, Ghulam Ahmad emerged as a writer and debater for Islam. When he was just over 40 years of age, his father died and around that time he believed that God began to communicate with him. He took a pledge of allegiance from 40 of his supporters at Ludhiana and formed a community of followers upon what he claimed was divine instruction, stipulating 10 conditions of initiation, an event that marks the establishment of the Ahmadiyya movement. The mission of the movement, according to him, was the reinstatement of the absolute oneness of God, the revival of Islam through the moral reformation of society along Islamic ideals, and the global propagation of Islam in its pristine form. As opposed to the Christian and mainstream Islamic view of Jesus (or Isa), being alive in heaven to return towards the end of time, Ghulam Ahmad asserted that he had in fact survived crucifixion and died a natural death. He traveled extensively across the Punjab preaching his religious ideas and rallied support by combining a reformist programme with his personal revelations which he claimed to receive from God, attracting thereby substantial following within his lifetime as well as considerable hostility particularly from the Muslim Ulema. He is known to have engaged in numerous public debates and dialogues with Christian missionaries, Muslim scholars and Hindu revivalists.”
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