Islam's Peaceful Warrior: Abdul Ghaffar Khan

About the Book

To receive a FREE, 75-page study guide in PDF format for this book, go to www.jeanakhtarcerrina.com.

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 cen

About the Author

Born in Scotland, Jeanne E. Gendreau knows six languages, including Hindi and Urdu. She stayed in an Indian village and sometimes wore a full-length, black veil while she was married to an Indian Muslim. She especially enjoyed talking to villagers who didn't speak any English. Jeanne writes for both children and adults. She has three daughters and now lives in the Midwest with a small, gray cat and her youngest, teenage daughter, both of whom are sullen but sweet, and with a big dog, who is sweet but not sullen. She loves to learn languages, meditate, and fiddle.