Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Four Myths of Nonviolence

By far the most dramatic shanti sena the world has ever seen was organized in what was then the North-West Frontier Province by the Mahatma’s close disciple, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan; and Khan did this not among gentle Hindus but the notoriously warlike Pathans. [8a] These are the same people who, along with other Afghans, would stand up to the overwhelmingly superior military force of the Soviet Union half a century later—and then, tragically, tear themselves to pieces in armed factions. But that was later, when they went back to more traditional methods of fighting. Our story concerns the days, under Khan’s inspiring leadership, when nearly one hundred thousand Pathan (Pakhtun, or Pashtun) fighters—all devout Muslims—vowed to resist the British without weapons in their hands or violence in their hearts, and kept that vow under unbelievable provocation, adding immeasurably to the unstoppable drive toward freedom.

Abdul Ghaffar Khan first heard Gandhi as a young man at the All India Congress party meeting at Calcutta in December of 1928. He had heard of Gandhi, of course, and must have been intrigued that the Mahatma was doing in grand style what he had been doing for his own people through village uplift, education, empowerment of the women, and a steady weaning away from violence; but he had not come to Calcutta to hear Gandhi. At that time the honeymoon between Muslims and Hindus that warmed the first part of the decade was largely history. There was not much love lost between the two communities, and Khan had come to Calcutta only to attend a meeting of the Muslim League.

It was, however, an unruly and distasteful meeting of the League that year; in fact it soon broke up when one irate delegate pulled out a knife. So, more or less at a loss what to do with himself so far from home, Khan dropped around to the Congress pavilion. There, as it happens, Gandhiji was speaking to the accompaniment of a relentless heckler. Strangely, rather than being rattled, Gandhi seemed to get no end of amusement from his unruly “friend,” and went right on speaking through his chuckles. Khan was deeply impressed. A leader himself, and gifted with an eye for the outwardly small things that reveal nonviolent power, he at once understood what he was seeing in the Mahatma’s unflappable control of the situation. He went back to one of the Muslim leaders and suggested, rather naively, that they might get further with a little of that forbearance themselves. “So,” the irate leader cut him off, “the wild Pathans have come to teach us about tolerance!” [9] This is exactly what Khan would do.

Khan’s story explodes no less than four serious myths about nonviolence, and the Muslim leader’s curt rebuff illustrates one of them, namely that nonviolence is only for gentlefolk, i.e., it’s the weapon of the weak. Gandhi would explain that one had to be capable of violence before one could renounce it. It was precisely the Pathans, whose frontier-style traditions of revenge and violence went back uncounted centuries, who would most readily follow their badshah, their leader, when he created a new kind of army without weapons. These were the famous Khudai Khidmatgars, or “Servants of God.” Years later, when Khan himself was at a loss to explain how his Pathans were still nonviolent when most of the Hindus had bolted, Gandhi explained to him, “Nonviolence is not for cowards. It is for the brave, the courageous. And the Pathans are more courageous than the Hindus. That is why the Pathans were able to remain nonviolent.” [10]

A second widely accepted myth, as we’ve encountered often, is that since nonviolence is weak it can only work against weak opposition. It only worked in India, we are repeatedly told, because the British are so fair minded; (brace yourself now) “it would never have worked against the Nazis.” The British, however, were not so fair minded with the Servants of God. They dubbed them “Red Shirts,” and used their control of the press at home to play on age-old fears of Communism and invoke the mystique of the “Great Game” Britain had played for over a century against Russian influence in the Hindu Kush—quite an irony, considering that it would later be the Pathans who would thwart Soviet power in Afghanistan and thus be instrumental in bringing down the Soviet regime. When the “Red Shirts” refused to knuckle under to ordinary methods, the British sealed off the North-West Frontier Province and set to work humbling the proud Pathans in the way of imperialism everywhere, as though they had not heard that they themselves were supposed to be a civilized people. Homes and crops were razed; people beaten, stripped, and dragged through cesspools—civilians were bombed from the air for the first time in human history (ten years before Fascist planes bombed Guernica, which is usually cited as the breakthrough in this form of barbarism). They regarded the Pathans as “leopards,” and treated them accordingly.

The following is an eyewitness description of the attack on a crowd of nonviolent demonstrators protesting Khan’s arrest at the Kissa Khani Bazaar in Peshawar on April 23, 1930. It does not give the impression of a people whose fair mindedness made them a pushover for nonviolence.

“All of a sudden two or three armored cars came at great speed from behind without giving warning of their approach and drove into the crowd. Several people were run over, of whom some were injured and a few killed on the spot. The people . . . behaved with great restraint, collecting the wounded and dead.”

Despite this, the Congress Inquiry Committee report noted that

“. . . the troops were ordered to fire. Several people were killed and wounded and the crowd was pushed back some distance. At about half past eleven, endeavors were made by one or two outsiders to persuade the crowd to disperse and the authorities to remove the troops and the armored cars. The crowd was willing to disperse if they were allowed to remove the dead and the injured and if the armored cars were removed. The authorities, on the other hand, expressed their determination not to remove the armored cars and the troops. The result was that the people did not disperse and were prepared to lay down their lives. The second firing then began and, off and on, lasted for more than three hours . . .”

Gene Sharp continues:

“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 21 bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic. A young Sikh boy came and stood in front of a soldier and asked him to fire at him, which the soldier unhesitatingly did, killing him. . . . This state of things continued from 11 till 5 o’clock in the evening.” [11]

Enough said. The fierce repression gained the imperial power, in the end, a Pyrrhic victory. The Khudai Khidmatgars’ leader was jailed over and over again, and his organization was disbanded and passed from the scene. The Raj itself soon followed. The Khudai Khidmatgars had played a spectacular part in the liberation struggle, proving that force would no longer intimidate India, and their efforts worked where they may have seemed not to “work,” showing again that nonviolence can prevail, in its own way, against cruel and determined opposition.

Myth number three, and perhaps most crucial for today: nonviolence is OK for Hindus and Buddhists; it is not for Muslims. Whatever may be our stereotypes of “Islamic terrorists,” the jihad, and so forth, the Religion of the Prophet was not based on violence. No religion is. Like all other major world religions, Islam has a core devotion to positive, inward peace, however unevenly this commitment has been carried out in practice. [12] Of course, the Prophet and his followers fought for their place in history. Of course, many Muslims today believe, as many Christians and Jews believe, that they must fight their way to peace through the sword. But those who pray “in the Name of God, all Mercy, all Compassion” cannot believe that their Prophet was primarily a bringer of the sword, their Prophet who said, “Those who commit violence,—God has given them respite only until the day their eyes become glazed.” [13] There is another important hadith, or traditional saying, to the effect that the Prophet one day told his followers, “Help your brother, whether he is an aggressor or a victim of aggression.” When one of them asked, “How are we supposed to help the aggressor?” He replied, “By doing your best to stop him from aggression.” [14]  The Religion of the Prophet, in other words, entails not just a sentiment but a sophisticated comprehension of nonviolence.

And Badshah Khan was quite aware of this.

“There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pathan like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence. It is not a new creed. It was followed fourteen hundred years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca. . . . But we had so far forgotten it that when Gandhi placed it before us, we thought he was sponsoring a novel creed.” [15]

Myth number four, which is the “blasphemy” that we’re primarily concerned with here: nonviolence can’t be used in, or instead of, war. At its height, during the repression of 1930, the Khudai Khidmatgars numbered more than eighty thousand. They were trained, drilled, uniformed, and organized. They were committed to their leader and followed his orders even when they did not understand him—even unto death, as they demonstrated at the Kissa Khani Bazaar. That is, they were an army in every sense of the word, except that they were not armed with the physical instruments of death but rather, as far as they understood it, with the inner powers of life. The Servants showed that just as people can be trained and organized and steeled for war, they can be trained and organized and steeled for peace.

[8a] Pathan is an anglicized spelling for Pashtun, now coming back in vogue. The trib-

al homeland of the Pathans spans modern Pakistan (the North-West Frontier

Province of India) and Afghanistan.

[9] Eknath Easwaran, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1999), 107.

[10] Ibid., 195. On the Khudai Khidmatgars see Mukulika Bannerjee, The Pathan

Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier (Karachi: Oxford

University Press, 2000).

[11] Ibid., 122–23.

[12] Glenn Paige and others, Islam and Nonviolence (Honolulu: Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawai‘i, 1993); see also Michael Nagler, “Is There a Tradition of Nonviolence in Islam?” in War and Its Discontents: Pacifism and Quietism in the Abrahamic Traditions, J. Patout Burns, ed. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 161–66. An excellent book is: Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2003).

[13] Complete Sahih Bukhari: A Collection of the Hadith in Sahih Bukhari, vol. 3, book 43, no. 624, to be found at www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/bukhari/043.sbt.html.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Eknath Easwaran, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam, 183.