Yuz Asaf

Local Kashmiri traditions state that the Yuz Asaf was a prophet of Ahle-Kitab (People of the Book) whose real name was Isa – the Quranic name for Jesus. The prophet Yuz Asaf came to Kashmir from the West (Holy Land) during the reign of Raja Gopdatta (c 1st century A.D) according to the ancient documents held by the current custodian of the tomb.[2]

According to Tarikh-i-Kashmir, a history of Kashmir written between 1579–1620, Yuzu Asaf was a Prophet of God who travelled to Kashmir from a foreign land.[3]

In 1747, a local Srinagar Sufi writer, Khwaja Muhammad Azam Didamari, stated that the Roza Bal is a shrine to a foreign prophet and prince, Youza Asouph.[4]

Having stumbled upon research by Russian explorer Nicolas Notovitch, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement, identified Yuz Asaf as the name that Jesus of Nazareth may have assumed following his crucifixion and migration from Israel.[5] Ahmad further identified that the Roza Bal shrine located in Srinagar, Kashmir is the tomb of Jesus.[6]

These beliefs are discussed in the book Jesus in India, written by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. In these publications he proposed the belief that the tomb of Yuz Asaf in the Roza Bal shrine, located in the Khanyar district of Srinagar, Kashmir - was that of Jesus of Nazareth.[7] Drawing on Kashmiri oral traditions, as well as the Qur'an, Hadith and accounts by explorers, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad postulated that Jesus travelled to Srinagar, where he settled and married a woman called Maryam (Mary), and that Maryam bore Yuza Asif children, before he died aged 120 years. Ahmadiyya writers assert that Mary (mother of Jesus) is buried in the town Murree in Pakistan (see Mai Mari da Ashtan).[8]

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's use of various Hindu and Islamic sources have been deemed to be misunderstandings or distortions by various scholars of Buddhism including the Swedish scholar Per Beskow in Jesus in Kashmir: Historien om en legend (1981), the German indologist Günter Grönbold, in Jesus in Indien - Das Ende einer Legende (1985) and Norbert Klatt, in Lebte Jesus in Indien?: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Klärung (1988).

These views are considered to be blasphemous by the majority Sunni Islamic scholars and authorities who assert that Jesus is alive in heaven. [9] Muslim residents at the shrine believe Yuz Asaf was a Sufi saint.[10] Indologist Günter Grönbold in his Jesus in Indien assesses that the shrine was previously Hindu, before the Islamization of Kashmir and is possibly the grave of a Buddhist or Hindu saint rather than a Sufi, but, in any case, has no connection with Jesus or Christianity.[11]

• Jesus in Ahmadiyya Islam

Sources

Ijaz, Tahir (1986). "Yuz Asaf and Jesus: The Buddhism Connection" (PDF). The Review of Religions. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 August 2017. Retrieved 23 May 2020.