eventually led to a veritable secession and the formation of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement. Adopting a position more congruent with the mainstream of Sunni Islam regarding the issues of dispute, Muhammad Ali led the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement as Amīr (President) from 1914 until his death in 1951. Since then it has been led by four Amīrs, the current being Abdul Karim Saeed Pasha. Relative to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, some mainstream Muslim opinion towards the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement and its literature has been more accepting, with some Orthodox Sunni scholars considering the members of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement as Muslims. Notwithstanding, the group was subsumed within Pakistan's anti-Ahmadi laws declaring Ahmadis to be non-Muslims and prohibiting them from any public expression of the Islamic faith. Difference in viewpoints On prophethood Ahmadis universally concur in the belief that Ghulam Ahmad was both the promised Mahdi and Messiah foretold by Muhammad to appear in the end times, and that his prophetic qualities were neither independent nor separable from those of Muhammad. What this entailed theologically, however, became an issue of contention within the early Ahmadiyya movement. Muhammad Ali held that the type of prophecy described by Ghulam Ahmad in reference to himself did not make him a prophet in the technical sense of the word as used in Islamic terminology, amounted to nothing more than sainthood (walāya) and that Islamic mystics preceding Ghulam Ahmad had similarly described experiences of prophecy within Islam in the context of their relationship with Muhammad. Unlike the majority Muslim belief which expects the physical return of Jesus, the Lahore Ahmadiyya affirm the absolute cessation of prophethood, and believe that no prophet can appear after Muhammad, neither a past one like Jesus, nor a new one. In contrast, Mahmud Ahmad posited that Ghulam Ahmad's messianic claim and role were qualitatively distinct to the claims of the saints preceding him in Islam and that his prophetic status, though completely subservient to Muhammad, being a mere reflection of his own prophethood and not legislating anything new, still made him technically a prophet irrespective of the type of prophethood or the adjectives added to qualify it. Accordingly, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community believes that prophecy gifted as a result of perfect obedience and self-effacement in devotion to Muhammad does not infringe upon the finality of his prophetic mission, though it affirms the advent of only one such promised end-times prophetic figure (Ghulam