What did the founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat claim to be?

Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (as), the Promised Messiah, declared that God had sent him as the reformer of this age. He said he was the promised Messiah and Mahdi, a servant of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw), and that in him the hopes of other religions for a saviour in the last days were also fulfilled in a spiritual sense.

Almost every major religion awaits a saviour in the last days. Christians await the second coming of Jesus (as). Muslims await the Messiah and the Mahdi. Hindus await Krishna, and other religions know such a promise too. What stands out is that the signs these scriptures give for that time are very similar and point to the same era.

What if all these promises were fulfilled literally? Then many messengers would come at once, each with his own message, and each would claim that the signs of the age pointed to him. The result would be chaos, with no one able to tell who was really from God. That is not how God acts. The other possibility is that a single person comes who unites all these expectations in himself.

That is exactly what Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (as), the Promised Messiah, claimed. He said he was the Messiah and Mahdi awaited by Muslims. And he said that, in a spiritual sense, he was also the one awaited by other religions. He brought no new law. He saw himself entirely as a servant of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw), sent to bring the Holy Qur’an and the Prophet's way of life back to life.

His reasoning was simple. Whoever comes from God brings, at heart, the same message and contradicts no other messenger of God. If you trace the religions back to their sources, they do not differ in their foundations. It was later generations who drove them apart. A reformer who represents them all can therefore bring them together again.

Many people have misunderstood this claim, or deliberately distorted it, as if he wanted to call himself a Christian one day and a Hindu the next. Anyone who reads his own writings, however, sees that he explained it clearly. His concern was the unity of the divine message, and leading humanity back to the one God.