Safoora Arbab on Recovering the Transformative Story of the Khudai Khidmatgar

Our guest this week on Nonviolence Radio was our friend and board member, Safoora Arbab.

Here’s her full interview.

What does it mean for a revolution to transform not only political structures, but our understanding of ourselves? On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we speak with independent scholar and educator Safoora Arbab about the Khudai Khidmatgar, the remarkable nonviolent movement that emerged among the Pashtun people in the Northwest Frontier of British India. Arbab challenges familiar accounts that portray the movement as the achievement of a single leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, or as an example of Gandhi bringing nonviolence to an otherwise violent culture. Drawing especially on the movement’s vernacular literature and women’s poetry, she shows how the Khudai Khidmatgar drew upon Islam, Sufi traditions, and existing Pashtun practices to transform ideas about violence, honor, gender, and resistance. Their struggle against colonial rule was also a constructive effort to create something new: schools, systems of conflict resolution, political participation, and ultimately a different way of imagining society itself.