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Ghaffar Khan
Peace Warrior
The seething hatred and violence in South Asia, pitting Hindu and Muslim nationalists makes this a good time to reconsider the life of a great Pashtun warrior who lies buried in the ancient city of Jalalabad. His name was Abdul Ghaffar Khan.
His story is contained in Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, A Man To Match His Mountains, by Eknath Easwaran (Published by Nilgiri Press). Easwaran is a meditation teacher who founded the California-based Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in 1961. The Nilgiri Press is associated with the center.
Born near the Khyber Pass to a prosperous landowning family, Ghaffar Khan was more than six feet tall and powerfully built. A devout Muslim, he led a trained Islamic army -- the Khudai Khidmatgars, or Servants of God. It was a private force, formed to free the Pashtun tribesmen from British imperial rule. The Khudai Khidmatgars were thoroughly professional, with uniforms, officers, regimental flags and even a bagpipe corps. But the soldiers swore the strangest oath that warriors -- especially fierce Pashtun warriors -- could take:
I promise to refrain from violence and taking revenge.
I promise to forgive those who oppress me or treat me with cruelty.
Ghaffar Khan believed the mortal weakness of his fellow tribesmen was an obsession with honor and revenge killings. They helped perpetuate a cycle of violence that the British were quick to exploit for their own purposes.
In time, this devout Muslim befriended India's Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolent protest. Photographs from the 1930s show the diminutive "Gandhiji" sitting next to the immense Pashtun warrior at rallies uniting Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi chanted from the Bhagavad Gita, a work sacred to Hindus, while Khan responded with passages from the Koran, the sacred book of Islam.
The bright-colored uniforms of Ghaffar Khan's soldiers gave them a sobriquet: Red Shirts. On one April day in 1930, the Red Shirts showed their courage and devotion to the non-violent teachings of their leader when the British Army took one whole day to shoot down innumerable Red Shirts. As a Harvard scholar writes: "The Red Shirts kept standing at the spot facing the British soldiers and were fired at from time to time, until there were heaps of wounded and dying lying about. This state of things continued from eleven till five o'clock in the evening. When the number of corpses became too many the ambulance cars of the government took them away and burned them."
Ghaffar Khan endured beatings and arrests and continued to lead his Red Shirts on a path of nonviolence until the end of the British Raj.
As communal and sectarian violence racked South Asia following the end of British rule, Ghaffar Khan and Gandhi travelled the Indian subcontinent, demanding that the fighting stop. At prayer meetings, the two read from one another's sacred scriptures and calmed the crowds.
"A person who has known God will be incapable of harboring anger or fear within him, no matter how overpowering the cause it may be," Ghandi would say.
Ghaffar Khan also championed women's rights. "In the Holy Koran you have an equal share with men," he told them. "You are today oppressed because we men have ignored the commands of God and the Prophet..."
When partition gave Pakistan independence, Ghaffar Khan boycotted the ceremonies -- as Gandhi did similar events in New Delhi. And while Gandhi fell to an assassin's bullet, within a few years, the Pakistani government became the jailer of Ghaffar Khan. His son, Abdul Wali Khan,
said that his father spent "every third year of his life in jail."
In the climate of festering hate that exists today, it is good to remember a gentle giant who envisioned a different kind of Jihad -- a path of peace and brotherhood.
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