Badshah Khan: The forgotten Muslim hero

After the recent devastating attacks on London, and with no end in sight to global terror being committed in the name of Islam, it is hardly surprising that people continue to ask: “is there really such a thing as peaceful Islam?” Well I’m not really interested in getting in to this debate, instead I want to highlight a little-known Muslim who has been a hero of mine since I first heard about him in highschool: Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988), popularly known as Badshah Khan ( “the King of the Khans” ). When I first learned about him I was quite surprised that one of the greatest and most well-organized nonviolent movements in modern history was instigated by a Muslim. I was even more surprised to learn that this nonviolent movement took place among the Pashtun people. The British used to refer to the Pashtun as a “martial race”, as they have a notorious reputation of unending blood feuds amongst each other. We are talking about the same Pashtun people among whom the Taliban was born.

In 1930 Khan formed the Khudai Khidmatgar, literally the “Servants of God”, in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of British India (now in Pakistan). The aim of the movement was the social upliftment of the Pashtuns through education and by ending the culture of tribal feuds, and later to oppose British colonialism (alongside Gandhi’s movement in other parts of British India). The strategy was crucially focused around the principles of nonviolence and religion. Before becoming a member of the Khudai Khidmatgar one first had to take an oath consisting of several points, some of which are listed below (taken from this article):

I am a Servant of God, and as God needs no service, but serving his creation is serving him,
I promise to serve humanity in the name of God.
I promise to refrain from violence and from taking revenge.
I promise to forgive those who oppress me or treat me with cruelty.
I promise to refrain from taking part in feuds and quarrels and from creating enmity.
I will live in accordance with the principles of nonviolence.
I will serve all God’s creatures alike; and my object shall be the attainment of the freedom of my country and my religion.
I will never desire any reward whatever for my service.
All my efforts shall be to please God, and not for any show or gain.
The movement became extremely popular with its membership growing to 120,000 people and was twice voted in to government. The British and the local elites (including the mullahs) were obviously threatened by the popularity of Khan’s movement (which was spreading to Pashtun Afghanistan) because of its demands for the end of colonialism, the redistribution of land, and the empowerment of women, among other things. As a result the Khidmatgars were suppressed by means of mass arrests, killings, torture, and the destroying of homes and fields. Yet they held strong to their vows of nonviolence, with not a single report of a Khidmatgar ever killing someone in retaliation.

An article in The Progressive tells us:

In the single worst incident, the British killed at least 200 Khidmatgar members in Peshawar on April 23, 1930. Gene Sharp, who has written a study of nonviolent resistance, describes the scene on that day: “When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with their breasts bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic. . . . The Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore, which represents the official view, itself wrote to the effect that the people came forward one after another to face the firing and when they fell wounded they were dragged back and others came forward to be shot at. This state of things continued from 11 till 5 o’clock in the evening. When the number of corpses became too many, the ambulance cars of the government took them away.”

The carnage stopped only because a regiment of Indian soldiers finally refused to continue firing on the unarmed protesters, an impertinence for which they were severely punished.

An article in the ISIM Review (Issue 3, July 1999, pp 22) tells of the anticommunalist nature of the movement:

When the communal fighting intensified [during the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan], due to the British colonial authorities’ failure to provide adequate safety, the Khidmatgars, with great risks to their own lives, protected thousands of Hindus in their villages. Their dictum was that every majority must protect its minorities.

The two very notable aspects about Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar is that it was a religiously inspired movement (made obvious by the name and the religious references in the oath), and that it was a populist movement — not a movement on the fringes of the local Muslim society.

Unfortunately, the repression against Khan continued after the British left because of his opposition to the creation of Pakistan, and he spent a total of almost 36 years in prison during his life. The Pakistani government viewed him as a traitor rather than a hero and made sure that his name did not enter the official history textbooks. And so this great man, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, one of the very few modern day Muslim heroes, and his nonviolent Muslim movement are unknown to the majority of Pakistanis and Muslims.

To learn more about Abdul Ghaffar Khan try the external links section of his Wikipedia article, and read Eknath Easwaran’s Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, A Man to Match His Mountains (Nilgiri Press, 1999).

Originally published at http://chanad.weblogs.us/?p=397 and reprinted in TAM with permission.