What is the difference between Ahmadis and non-Ahmadis? Ahmadis believe that the promised reformer of the latter days has come in the person of Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, and the non-Ahmadis reject his claim to have been commissioned by God. That is the major difference, right? Also one other important difference perhaps is that they believe that Jesus Christ of old, born more than 2000 years ago, is still alive in heaven, and he is the person who would bodily descend in fulfilment of the promise of Hazrat Muhammad Rasulullah s.a.w. to appear as the Imam of the latter days.
We believe, no, it’s all hocus-pocus, meaningless. He died like all other human beings died, like all other prophets died, and returned to his God, his Lord, and somebody in his name and in his character was to come from God and he would be called Jesus Christ or Christ only in character because he would be bearing some similarities to the older Christ. So as such we believe with the advent of Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, Christ was also reborn in character, not in person. As such the prophecy is fulfilled, and the non-Ahmadis take this prophecy to be too literal.
They take it too literally, they say no, the same old Christ must bodily descend from heaven. Which heaven? Where from? They don’t know. If you ask them this question scientifically, that now that almost the entire universe has been mapped, and there is no possibility of human life to be present in the known world to man so far, where is Jesus, where is he sitting alone, in which star? And you know the nearest star from earth, apart from those orbiting around sun, the system of satellites, I’m not talking of them, but the stars, the nearest star is seen through the light which it emits, and for the light to reach the earth it takes many thousand years.
So even if Jesus has started descending, the moment he was raised to that star, it would take him at ordinary speed at which man can travel, hundreds of thousands of years yet to come. So it’s all absurd, meaningless. They take literally what was not meant to be taken literally, which was a metaphoric expression. Sometimes you say somebody is like Shakespeare, if he’s a good dramatist, if he’s a great poet, you say he’s Ghalib. If he’s a great wrestler, you call him Rustam. And if he’s very generous, you sometimes give him the title of Hatam Tai.
Sometimes you say he’s like, but more often you say he’s Hatam Tai of today, he’s Rustam of today, he’s Shakespeare of India and so on and so forth. So why do you give him a different name? Because what you indicate is that in character he’s similar to that person. So that is why the title Jesus Christ was given to the future reformer by Hazrat Muhammad only to indicate similarities in character.
