CDS (II) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 14 of 120

Correct — D, Gurdaspur. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born at Qadian in 1835 and founded his movement there. Qadian is a town in Gurdaspur district of Punjab, about eighteen kilometres north-east of Batala, and the movement's beginning is dated to 23 March 1889, when Ahmad took a pledge of allegiance from forty followers at Ludhiana on the ten conditions he had published that January. Qadian remained the headquarters of the Ahmadiyya community until the Partition of India in 1947, after which the headquarters moved to Rabwah in Pakistan; the town retains the community's founding institutions and Ahmad's grave. The town itself is much older than the movement, founded in 1530 by Ahmad's ancestor Mirza Hadi Beg, who had migrated from Samarkand.

• (a)Patna — Patna and its suburb Sadiqpur are associated with the nineteenth-century Wahhabi or Tariqah-i-Muhammadiyah movement, not with the Ahmadiyya.
• (b)Aligarh — The obvious distractor, because Aligarh is where Sayyid Ahmad Khan founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875 and launched the Aligarh movement — a movement of modern education, quite separate from Ahmad's.
• (c)Bhopal — A princely state known for its women rulers and for patronage of Muslim learning, but not the seat of any of the reform movements usually asked about in this period.

Nineteenth-century Muslim India produced several distinct responses to colonial rule and to internal reform. Deoband, founded in 1866, worked through traditional religious scholarship; Aligarh, from 1875, through English education and cooperation with the Government; the Ahl-i-Hadith through a return to scripture; and the Ahmadiyya movement, founded at Qadian in 1889, around Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's own claim to be the promised reformer of the age. Each is identified in examinations by a place and a founder, which is exactly what this item tests.

Movements of this period are best filed as place-and-founder pairs, and the pairing here is Qadian and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. The catch in the option list is that Qadian is a small town and the question names the district instead, so a candidate who has memorised Qadian without knowing where it is has nothing to match. The fix is to remember that Qadian is in Punjab, and Gurdaspur is the only Punjab district in the list — Patna is in Bihar, Aligarh in the United Provinces and Bhopal in central India. The movement's followers are still often called Qadianis after the town, which is another way into the same link.

• Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born on 13 February 1835 at Qadian, a town in Gurdaspur district of Punjab.
• He founded the Ahmadiyya community on 23 March 1889 by taking a pledge from forty followers at Ludhiana, on ten conditions published in January that year.
• Qadian was established in 1530 by Mirza Hadi Beg, an ancestor who had migrated from Samarkand and was appointed qadi of the surrounding district.
• Qadian remained the headquarters of the movement until the Partition of India in 1947.
• Ahmad died on 26 May 1908 at Lahore and was buried at Qadian.

• Answering Aligarh out of habit because it is the best-known Muslim reform centre of the period.
• Knowing the town Qadian but not the district Gurdaspur, when the option list names only the district.
• Confusing Mirza Ghulam Ahmad with Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi of the Wahhabi movement or with Sayyid Ahmad Khan of Aligarh — three different men with similar names.

As a founder-and-place pairing across the reform movements, or as a matching item joining a movement to its headquarters.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, from which the Aligarh movement takes its name, was founded by which one of the following?

  • (a)Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
  • (b)Sayyid Ahmad Khan
  • (c)Muhammad Qasim Nanautavi
  • (d)Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi

  Answer(b) Sayyid Ahmad Khan — he founded the college at Aligarh in 1875, the institution that later became Aligarh Muslim University.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Dar-ul-Ulum at Deoband, founded in 1866, is best described as which one of the following?

  • (a)A centre of modern English education for Muslims
  • (b)A seminary of traditional Islamic scholarship
  • (c)The headquarters of the Ahmadiyya movement
  • (d)A princely college for the sons of Muslim nobility

  Answer(b) A seminary of traditional Islamic scholarship — Deoband's method was religious learning in the classical tradition, in deliberate contrast to Aligarh's English education.