Asal e musaffa - Birth year

Asal-e-Musaffa is a two-volume Urdu work by Mirza Khuda Bakhsh, a follower of Ghulam Ahmad, written to defend his claims to be the Promised Messiah and Mahdi. Its title, meaning "purified honey", draws on the Qur'anic description of Paradise. It was first printed in April 1901, while Ghulam Ahmad was still alive. On the question of his birth, it says:

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"Hazrat Mirza Sahib [...] ki wiladat ba-sa'adat Sikhon ke aakhri waqt ya'ni 1839 ya 1840 ee mein hui hai"

Translation:

"The blessed birth of Hazrat Mirza Sahib [...] took place at the final time of the Sikhs, namely 1839 or 1840 CE"

— (Mirza Khuda Bakhsh, Asal-e-Musaffa, Islamia Press, Lahore, April 1901, p. 585)

This is not a figure put about by critics. It comes from a book written by one of Ghulam Ahmad's own followers and published in his lifetime, and nobody at the time seems to have thought it needed correcting. Ghulam Ahmad died in 1908. If he was born in 1839 or 1840, he was about 68 when he died, short of the age the prophecy about his lifespan was taken to promise.

In 1913 the second volume was printed again, this time in Qadian. The same passage appears, word for word, apart from one detail:

Show Transliteration

"Hazrat Mirza Sahib [...] ki wiladat ba-sa'adat Sikhon ke aakhri waqt ya'ni 1836 ya 1837 ee mein hui hai"

Translation:

"The blessed birth of Hazrat Mirza Sahib [...] took place at the final time of the Sikhs, namely 1836 or 1837 CE"

— (Mirza Khuda Bakhsh, Asal-e-Musaffa, Vol. 2, Allah Bakhsh Steam Press, Qadian, 1913, p. 235)

Only the dates have changed. Both years have been pushed back by three, and nothing on the 1913 page tells the reader that a correction has been made. Anyone reading only the later edition would never know the book had once said something different.

The timing is the whole point. When the book first came out, Ghulam Ahmad was alive and the prophecy had not been tested. Once he had died, the original date left him short. The new one puts him at around 71 or 72 when he died, which brings him much closer to the mark.

A misprint does not explain this. Printing errors do not usually move two numbers by the same amount and leave every other word where it was. The reference to "the final time of the Sikhs" was also kept, even though it suits the old dates better than the new ones. Nor can the change be blamed on an outside publisher. The 1913 edition was printed in Qadian, by an Ahmadi press, while the movement was under its first khalifa. The simplest explanation is that once Ghulam Ahmad's death had made the original date a problem for the prophecy, the date was changed, and the book went back into print as if it had said so all along.