The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam universally accepts the process of evolution, albeit divinely guided, and actively promotes it. Over the course of several decades, the movement has issued various publications in support of the scientific concepts behind the process of evolution and frequently engages in promoting how religious scripture supports the concept.
Ahmadi Muslims reject the creationist doctrine that Adam was the first human being on Earth, and proclaim that he was appointed as the first Prophet of God. They point to a verse in the Quran which refers to the appointment of a representative of God on earth, rather than the creation of a new species: Ahmadis reason that the angels could only have questioned the appointment of a human being as a prophet because they had already witnessed disorder and bloodshed amongst the already-existing humans. The story of Adam and Eve as given in the Bible is viewed by Ahmadis as being more of an account of religious history than a history of the entire human race. Belal Khalid, an Ahmadi scholar, states in his work, “Original Sin”:
Guided evolution
Ahmadi Muslims do not take all the Quranic and Biblical creation narratives literally, but understand some of the passages metaphorically. Darwinian evolution as well as intelligent design models are rejected as are certain aspects of Islamic creationism that some modernist religious bodies have postulated. Instead they propound the concept of "guided evolution". Mirza Tahir Ahmad favored the perspective that the human race was created gradually via evolution under the supervision of God. He interpreted the Quran's description of different human "stages", traditionally believed to refer to fetal development, as references to evolutionary stages: Ahmad believed that these verses support the notion that the creation of the human race was the culmination of a gradual evolutionary process, as opposed to a literalist reading of the creation story, in which mankind was created in an instant. Thus Ahmadis accept the concept of evolution in principle, but do not accept Darwinian evolution in all its details. They deny that natural selection occurred purely by chance, or merely by survival of the fittest – and view each stage of the evolutionary process as being selectively and continually woven to an intricate level by one creator. Ahmadis contend that the processes of life on Earth started from one single point of species with a mixture of water and a viscous clay-like substance. The creation of Adam was a slow gradual evolutionary process that occurred over several stages, with each stage being of a variable timescale - perhaps over billions of years. In his book Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth, Mirza Tahir Ahmad, the late leader of the Ahmadiyya movement, elaborated the complex mechanism of evolution as having been played more like strategic game of chess than a game of dice. Subsequently evolutionary processes could only have been guided by a vastly higher intelligence, like God.
Similar to theistic realism and the stance of modernist Islamic scholars, Ahmadis adopt a scientific cosmological approach to explaining the formation of universe initiated from the Big Bang. They interpret some Quranic verses as references to the Big Bang theory, the formation of the Earth, and the Big Crunch theory.
Six individual phases of creation
Furthermore, Ahmadis highlight several verses in the Quran where it mentions of "Six periods of creation" and use these verses to explain the theory that the universe began roughly 13 billion years ago. A single period, in the Ahmadi view, has no definitive timescale and could mean anywhere from one day to billions of years. According to the Ahmadiyya view the universe passed from stage to stage till the Earth assumed a shape and developed properties which could sustain human life.
Extraterrestrial evolution
Generally, Ahmadis believe that life is almost certainly not limited to planet Earth. The possibility of life having evolved on other planets is clearly established in the first chapter of the Qur'an which speaks of the plurality of worlds: The following verse corroborates this interpretation: Ahmadis believe that any planet that contains the key ingredient of life—water—may also harbour life, as God has created all living things from water:
