Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988)
A great peacemaker
in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King
Is violence Islam’s true message? No, said the great Muslim leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The book “Islam’s Peaceful Warrior: Abdul Ghaffar Khan” tells the true story of Khan’s amazing life. A close colleague of Mahatma Gandhi, Ghaffar Khan founded a popular movement of nonviolent Muslims in South Asia. In a profound spiritual victory, many of his followers chose to die rather than fight when confronted. He taught that being Muslim means never hurting another person, that men and women are equal, and that God gives victory to those who refuse to fight.
Today, this is a message the world longs to hear.
Book Summary:
It is better to die than to fight back. This is the message of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a great leader in the nonviolent tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But while King was a devout Christian and Gandhi was a devout Hindu, Ghaffar Khan was a devout Muslim who taught that being a Muslim means complete submission to God’s will. He taught that a Muslim never hurts another person, that men and women are completely equal, and that God gives victory to those who refuse to fight. He believed that God requires complete nonviolence from every Muslim, and that this submission to God’s will gives enormous power to the individual and to the Muslim community.
Khan was a tribal chief, the son of a Pashtun chief, and he was an enormous, powerful man who stood more than 6’3" tall. He was born in about 1890 in the far northwestern mountains of what is Pakistan today, near Peshawar. At that time Pakistan was a part of India, and India was a colony of Great Britain.
As a boy growing up, he saw that his people, the Pashtuns, suffered terribly from violence in their lives. Every week he heard stories about murder and revenge, done because of ancient tribal customs. His schoolteacher beat the students often. It seemed there was violence and pain everywhere. Even as a child, he hated the inequality and violence of the world around him.
Yet traditional values tempted him too. He even enlisted to become an officer in the Queen’s Corps of Guides, an elite British army unit. But he was also proud of being a Pashtun. When he saw a British officer insult an Indian friend, he resigned his commission and left the army.
By 1920, the Indian independence movement was growing strong. The Indians wanted to force the English to stop ruling over them. A new leader, Gandhi, was teaching that by staying nonviolent when the British beat them, the Indians could become more powerful than the British and force them to leave.
While Gandhi was working in the lowlands of India, Ghaffar Khan was busy in the mountains of the northwest, starting schools and organizing people to oppose the British. The British arrested him and put him in prison. During his long years in prison, he met men from all the other Indian religions. He learned to love all faiths, and he saw first hand the incredible power of nonviolent resistance.
When he thought about what nonviolence meant to him as a Muslim, he saw that it was a perfect way to submit completely to God. The word “Islam” means submission; all Muslims want to submit to the will of God. Ghaffar Khan saw that by turning the other cheek, by never fighting back, a Muslim was truly submitting to God in the strongest possible way.
After he was released from prison, he founded an army of peace, a movement of Muslims who swore never to use violence in any form. His army of followers was called the “Servants of God,” the Khudai Khidmatgars in the Pashto language. They lived in camps and wore red shirts as a uniform. Pashtun women also joined the movement, without their veils.
In April 1930, during a peaceful demonstration in Peshawar, British soldiers began to shoot the peaceful demonstrators, including old men, women, and children. Ghaffar Khan’s followers, in their red shirts, chose to walk straight into the gunfire rather than fight the British who were slaughtering hundreds. Later there were many other instances when Ghaffar Khan’s followers won power and respect by refusing to ever fight back. The courage of these nonviolent Muslim warriors electrified the world and helped India win independence from Great Britain.
Ghaffar’s son Ghani said the following about him:
“The holiest and the finest in a man is as inexpressible as stardust and moonlight. Badshah Khan has discovered that love can create more in a second than bombs can destroy in a century; that the kindest strength is the greatest strength; that the only way to be truly brave is to be in the right; that a clean dream is dearer than life itself.”
Ghaffar Khan continued to be a great leader after the formation of Pakistan in 1947, but he was often jailed by the government. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and he was an Amnesty International Prisoner of the Year. He died in 1988.
Overall, in his lifetime, he spent more than 40 years in prison under both the British and the Pakistani governments, but his message of peace, pride in being Muslim, and the absolute power of nonviolence lives on in the hearts of Pashtuns and Muslims everywhere.
Author’s biography
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1950, Jean Akhtar Cerrina grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. She loved school and quickly discovered that her two favorite things were reading and learning languages. The best thing about reading was being able to go to new worlds, such as Narnia, ancient England or through the looking glass. The best thing about learning languages was being able to make friends with people from other countries.
First, she learned French and Latin, then she learned Russian, and then she learned Hindi, which is written in the Devanagari script and looks very cool. She went to Delhi, India, to learn more Hindi. In Delhi, she also learned Urdu, which is written in the Arabic script, a difficult script to learn. Later, she learned Italian and visited Italy. Nowadays, she is working on learning Gaelic, a beautiful old language from Scotland and Ireland. After Gaelic, she thinks she might learn Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language.
While Jean was in India, she married an Indian man from a Muslim family. Being Muslim meant that the women in her husband’s family wore long, black veils called burqas when they went out of the house. Jean loved staying with her Muslim family in a village in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. When she went out, she wore a burqa too. The most fun was talking to village women and children who did not speak any English and had never met an American before. They told her about life in an Indian village, and she told them about life in America…