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In 1914, six years after the death of Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, some of his prominent followers, whom he had himself appointed to manage the movement after him, established the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha`at Islam in Lahore. It was formed in order to preserve and advance Hazrat Mirza's mission, and to save the movement from degenerating into just another squabbling sect of Islam.

Leaders of the Lahore Ahmadiyya movement have been recognised, by eminent Muslims outside the movement, as the ablest Muslim scholars, authors and missionaries of modern times. Maulana Muhammad Ali (d. 1951), the first head of the Anjuman, wrote numerous books about Islam, including many in English, and these have been acclaimed as making a true picture of Islam available to the world, and to the West for the first time. Khawaja Kamal-ud-Din (d. 1932) was the pioneer Muslim missionary to the West. He established the Woking Muslim Mission in England in 1913. The Anjuman also set up a mission in Berlin and completed a magnificent mosque there in 1926.

These missions were, for decades, the principal centres of Islam in Europe, and were supported by Muslims of all persuasions. The missions achieved considerable success in correcting the West's misconceptions about Islam and brought many Europeans into the Muslim faith, including several intellectuals, writers, and members of the British nobility.

The Lahore Ahmadiyya movement also sent its missionaries and literature to many other parts of the world, from Fiji in the remotest east to Suriname in the farthest west, where Muslim communities were helpless in the face of attacks upon the religion of Islam. The threat to Islam was comprehensively repulsed in all these places.