Muhammadi Begum

In the late 1880s, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani, as the chief of Qadian, was asked to sign a routine property transfer agreement on behalf of a relative who had been missing and presumed deceased. The Mirza asked the applicant to return the next day. On his return, the Mirza informed him that God had decreed that the applicant give his teenage daughter to the Mirza in marriage.

The family of the girl, Muhammadi Begum, did not cooperate with the proposal and instead planned to marry her off to Mirza Muhammad Sultan Beg of Patti (Punjab) on the day next to the Eid festival. When the Mirza heard of this, he threatened the whole extended family (his relatives) of the applicant and said that he would divorce his first wife and ask both of his sons to divorce their wives and if the sons did not comply he would disinherit them. (Ishtiharat) All three ladies were from the same family as Muhammadi Begum.

The girl's family did not succumb to the threats and proceeded to carry out the marriage which triggered the divorce of the first wife of the Mirza and that of his son, Mirza Fazal Ahmad. The other son, Mirza Sultan Ahmad, refused to divorce his wife.

The Mirza then prophesied that the father of the girl and her new husband would both die within a certain period (3-5 years) after her marriage and that had been decreed by God and that the girl would come back to him as his wife. The elderly father died within the period but the husband continued to live well into the 20th century and survived World War I as a soldier. He fathered more than 7 children and got substantial land from the government for his services. Contrary to Qadiani propaganda, he maintained that he respected the Mirza but was never part of his religion. (Periodical Ahl-e-Hadith, 24 March 1924, and 14 November 1930).

As late as 1901 and 1905, the Mirza stuck to his original story and prophecy (see links below), and died in 1908 without the 'prophecy' being fulfilled. This prophecy is considered one of the Mirza's great failures and caused many people to leave his movement. See links below: