Fr. Thomas Michel's Official Website

On 20 January 1988, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, one of the 20th Century’s great proponents of non-violent change, died at the age of 98 and was buried in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.  His funeral was the occasion of the first visit of an Indian Prime Minister to Pakistan in three decades and also occasioned a temporary cease-fire observed both by Soviet and mujahidin forces in Afghanistan, in order to allow free access to his burial.  Three years before his death, Abdul Ghaffar told an interviewer, AFor today’s children and the world, my thoughts are that only if they accept nonviolence can they escape destruction, and live a life of peace.  If this doesn’t happen, then the world will be in ruins.

1. Early years and training

Abdul Ghaffar, called ABadshah Khan (Khan of Khans) and AFakhr-e-Afghan (Pride of the Afghans) by his people, was a Pathan, born in 1890 in the village of Utmanzai, in the Northwest Frontier Province of British India.  Son of Behram Khan, a wealthy landowner and Mohamadzai chieftain, Abdul Ghaffar Khan began his education at a local madrasa, but left dissatisfied with the quality of education.  He continued his studies at the Edwards Mission High School in Peshawar and then at the AMohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, as it was then called, in Aligarh.  His opposition to British rule led him to reject an opportunity offered to study in England as well as a coveted commission in an elite British Indian army unit.   

Abdul Ghaffar’s conscientization to the realities of colonial rule began early when, at the age of seven he witnessed the bloody repression of a local uprising by the British forces.  He saw moreover that not all the destruction of human life was due to the colonial rulers; throughout his youth he also witnessed the recurrent cycles of vendettas caused by blood feuds among the tribes.  From these early experiences emerged the twin goals of his life: the need to struggle for Pathan independence, first from the British and later from Pakistan, where his region was assigned in the division of British India, and secondly, to establish the principles of non-violence through popular education.

His first involvement in public life was as a schoolteacher in his home village.  Together with the well-known Pashtun spiritual leader Haji Sahib Turangzai, Abdul Ghaffar founded 30-40 village schools between 1912-1919.  Haji Sahib, whose real name was Haji Fazl-e-Wahid, is a colorful figure in the history of the Frontier Province.  A dacoit (bandit) in his youth, Turangzai underwent a conversion and eventually became a Sufi pir of the Qadiriyya Tariqa.  In addition to waging jihad against colonial rule, Haji Sahib led a populist social reform aimed at ameliorating the situation of marginal sectors of society.  He is particularly remembered for providing dowries for poor girls to marry and for his efforts at education.  He is credited with founding a total of 120 schools in the Northwest Frontier, including laying the foundation in 1911 for what is today the Islamia College of Peshawar.  Haji Sahib’s contributions to Pathan history were recently commemorated in a seminar held in Charsadda in April, 2002.

The schools set up by Haji Sahib and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, since they operated independently of colonial administration, were viewed with suspicion by the British authorities.  When the pair announced the explicitly anti-colonial intentions of their schools, Abdul Ghaffar and Haji Sahib were forced to flee for their lives to tribal areas. 

Like Gandhi and many others in British India, Abdul Ghaffar’s opposition to colonial rule  turned to public protest with the promulgation of the Rowlett Acts of 1919, which curtailed the rights of freedom of the press and assembly, suspended popular participation in the appointment of local officials, and permitted the imprisonment of dissenters without charge.  When protesters against the Acts in Amritsar were fired upon by colonial troops, 379 were killed and many more injured, and Gandhi announced his policy of non-cooperation.  Abdul Ghaffar was among those arrested and imprisoned in the Frontier Province and spent the first of almost 40 years he would pass in prison during his lifetime for non-violent activities.  

2. The Khilafat movement (1919-1924)

Abdul Ghaffar’s earliest political involvement was with the Khilafat movement, founded in 1919 by two brothers, Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali.  The Khilafat Conference grew out of the repercussions resulting from the decision of the Ottoman state to enter World War I on the side of Germany.  During the war, several leading Muslims in British India, including Muhammad Ali, were imprisoned for their support of the Ottomans who were fighting against the British forces.  After the war, there was widespread fear among Muslims in India that the Ottoman Empire would meet dismemberment in a fate similar to that accorded to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that, in the process, the Holy Cities of Mecca and Madina would be placed under non-Muslim colonial rule.

Unlike the Muslim League, the heretofore leading Muslim nationalist organization in India, the Khilafat movement was pan-Islamic in orientation, with the Ottoman Califate as its political symbol.  The movement brought together Muslims of various religious backgrounds and political vision.  Mahmud al-Hasan, leader of the conservative Deoband-based Jam’iyyat al->ulama-yi Hind (Indian Ulama Organization), was in contact with Enver and the Turkish leaders and acted as an Ottoman agent in Mecca.  He was arrested by the Sharif Husayn and handed over to the British, who imprisoned him for the duration of the war in Malta.

The Sharif was hated by the followers of the Khilafa movement, who saw him as a rebel against the legitimate Sultan, an ambitious upstart who wanted to use his alliance with the British to pursue his rival claim to the califate.  To Indian Muslims engaged in agitating for the expulsion of the British from India, the fear was that the Sharif’s plan would open the door to British control over the Hijaz. 

The Khilafat Conference rejected the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which humiliated the Ottomans by  reducing Turkish sovereignty to approximately two/thirds of Anatolian territory, with Italian, Greek, French, and Armenian control over the rest and with Greek sovereignty in Thrace extending to the Black Sea.  A particularly bitter article of the treaty stipulated shared Greek-Turkish authority over the Bosphorus, Marmara, and Dardanelles.  England, France, Italy and Greece were the principal guarantors to insure that Turkey complied with the provisions, opening the possibility of further intervention if Turkey were not seen to be implementing the Treaty.

It is noteworthy that among the Allied Powers who were signatories to the Treaty was AThe Hedjaz, an inclusion, obviously dictated by the British, that seemed to confirm the worst fears of those involved in the Khilafat Conference.  The Treaty was an affront to Muslims around the world, and in British India it was a key factor in mobilizing Muslim public opinion against colonial rule.

The leading Khilafat theorist was Abu’l Kalam Azad, a progressive thinker much influenced by the ideas of Jamal al-Din Afghani.  According to Azad, the Islamic umma formed a cohesive social organism opposed to jahiliyya, a situation of political chaos and confusion.  It was meant to be presided over by a khalifa, who governed through consultation.  The model of government was the period of the Four Rightly-Guided Califs.  Although the califate became monarchical in form under the Umayyads and Abbasids, and subsequently reduced to figurehead status in Mamluk and Ottoman times, the institution of the califate was, in the view of the Khilafat Conference, essential to the nature of the umma and owed allegiance by all Muslims.

Muhammad Ali succeeded in spreading these ideals to the Muslim masses of India and between 1919-1922, the Khilafat Conference and the Indian National Congress worked as twin organizations with a joint leadership.  In this period, Gandhi espoused the Khilafat cause, while Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali committed the Khilafat Conference to the Non-Cooperation movement.

Unforeseen historical developments in the Middle East and events in the Indian Subcontinent worked against the central concerns of the Khilafat movement and rendered its religious and political agenda irrelevant. In Turkey, with the emergence of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his expulsion of the foreign armies from Anatolia in 1921, the Treaty of Sèvres was set aside and replaced by that of Lausanne, which Bernard Lewis describes as Aan international recognition of the demands formulated in the Turkish National Pact.  In India, fears of European occupation and mutilation of the Ottoman Sultanate dissolved.  When in the following year the Sultanate was abolished, followed by the Califate in 1924, by the same Muslim hero who defied and defeated the European powers, reactions among Indian Muslims were ambivalent and confused.

Moreover, the conquest of the Holy Cities by the Saudis in 1924 resolved the fears of Indian Muslims that the Hijaz would fall prey to British occupation.  In India, during the same period, Muslim-Hindu relations deteriorated with local incidents of communal violence, and Muslims began to see their political agenda as different from that of Hindus. 

However, the Khilafat movement was instrumental in providing a platform for Muslims like Abdul Ghaffar Khan to involve themselves in the independence movement and develop the techniques of non-violent resistance.  Abdul Ghaffar made his first contact with Gandhi and other leaders at the Khilafat conference in Delhi and then at the Congress session at Nagpur in December, 1920.  Through his association with Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar became the leading exponent of the non-cooperation movement in the Frontier Province, advocating a boycott of colonial schools and courts, returning colonial academic degrees and military commissions, and the introduction of homespun cloth against British economic domination.

3. The Servants of God

In the 1920s, Abdul Ghaffar spent five years in prison for his protest activities.  There his ideas continued to develop and led to an unshakeable commitment to non-violence as a viable social and political option.  In 1927, he founded a Pashto journal, Pukhtoon, to further his goals. However, Abdul Ghaffar’s most profound contribution to Pathan history lay in his ability to instill in others the ideals by which he lived.  In 1929, he founded a nonviolent movement called the Khuda-i Khidmatgar, Athe Servants of God.  The movement, which eventually enrolled over 100,000 Pashtun/Pathan followers, was dedicated to social reform, poverty alleviation, conscientization of the peasantry, and to bringing to an end by non-violent means British rule in the still-undivided India.  Abdul Ghaffar became a close associate of Gandhi and remained so until the latter’s assassination.  He is still remembered today in the subcontinent as AFrontier Gandhi.  His calls for social change, equitable land distribution, and religious harmony were seen as a threat by the British raj as well as by some local politicians, religious leaders and landlords, and Abdul Ghaffar survived two assassination attempts and almost 40 years of imprisonment.

In Gandhi, he found a fellow spirit, and Abdul Ghaffar traveled extensively through the rural areas of the Northwest Frontier Province, preaching hard work, discipline and forgiveness rather than vengeance, and set up hundreds of schools for tribal children.  His charismatic personality attracted followers to his cause and the Khidmatgar movement. One historian describes Abdul Ghaffar’s movement as follows:

The fullest practical expression of Gandhism anywhere in India appeared among the Afghan tribes along the northwest frontier, under the leadership of Abdulghaffar Khan.  Noted for their feuding and raiding, these tribesmen were won to an active and almost universal program of social self-reform.  Feuding was stopped, discipline was imposed under the name of Service of God (Khuda-i-khidmat)...When nationalist campaigns for independence were launched, the Khudai-khidmatgars gave effective and faithful support.  At all times they remained firmly nonviolent.  Qur’anic encouragement of forgiveness as better than revenge became the foundation of a highly Muslim interpretation of Gandhi’s ideas.

Abdul Ghaffar applied the principles of Ghandi’s civil disobedience movement to the demands of the semi-tribal Afghan frontier region.  He urged his people to return the medals won in the British military, encouraged parents to withdraw their children from British universities, and advocated that Pathan lawyers cease practicing in British courts.  In the 1930s and 1940s, the British army tried to crush the Khidmatgar movement with extreme brutality, employing mass killings, torture, and destruction of members’ homes and fields. 

The ASurkh Posh (Red Shirts), as they were called from their practice of dying the homespun cloth in tanning dye, coupled social service and education with non-violent protest, a practice which both won the hearts of the Pathan people and conscientized the tribal peoples to the Quit India movement.  The Khidmatgars were early practitioners of techniques of conflict transformation which they applied to the recurrent internecine feuds among the Afghan tribesmen.  The British simply could not believe that a widespread nonviolent movement could arise in Pathan culture and responded with harsh repression.  An historian notes: AThe British treated Ghaffar Khan and his movement with a barbarity that they did not often inflict on other adherents of nonviolence in India. >The brutes must be ruled brutally and by brutes,’ stated a 1930 British report on the Pashtuns.

Abdul Ghaffar spent fifteen of those years in prison, often in solitary confinement, but the Pathans refused to give up their disciplined nonviolence even in the face of severe repression.  In the worst incident of the long struggle, the British killed over 200 Khidmatgar members at the Kissa Khani (Qissakhwani) Bazaar in the heart of Peshawar on 23 April 1930.  The arrest of Abdul Ghaffar’s lieutenants prompted the Khidmatgar to declare a general strike, and a huge crowd assembled in the bazaar.  The British confronted the assembly with armed troops and ordered the people to disperse.  When the unarmed crowd refused to leave the bazaar, the troops opened fire.  An historian has described the day:

When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with breasts bared and exposed themselves to the fire.  The people stood their ground without getting into a panic.  This continued from 11.00 until 5.00 p.m.  The carnage stopped only because a regiment of Indian soldiers finally refused to continue firing on unarmed protesters, an impertinence for which they were severely punished.

Another scholar notes that Abdul Ghaffar’s commitment to non-violence was even more sweeping than that of Gandhi’s Indian National Congress.  It also differed from that of the Congress in that the movement had Afirst of all, a religious basis ... It took as its objective both local socioeconomic reform and political independence ... Its adoption of nonviolence was more thorough than that of the Indian National Congress inasmuch as the Khudai Khidmatgar pledged themselves to nonviolence not only as a policy, but as a creed, a way of life.

4. Nonviolence as an Islamic principle

Abdul Ghaffar’s nonviolent activism was firmly rooted in his understanding of Islam, which he summarized in the key words mahabba (love), >amal (service), and yakîn (certitude, faith).  He interpreted Islam as a moral code with pacifism at its center.  He once related to Gandhi a discussion he had with a Punjabi Muslim who didn’t see the nonviolent core of Islam: AI cited chapter and verse from the Qur’an to show the great emphasis that Islam had laid on peace, which is its cornerstone, and I showed him how the greatest figures in Islamic history were known more for their forbearance and self-restraint than for their fierceness.  He viewed his struggle as a jihad in which only the enemy was holding swords.

Abdul Ghaffar’s daughter-in-law, Begum Nasim Wali Khan, was interviewed shortly after his death.  AHe told people that Islam operates on a simple principle - never hurt anyone by tongue, by gun, or by hand.  Not to lie, steal, and harm is true Islam, she said.  Although firmly based on the principles of Islam, the movement was nonsectarian.  When Hindus and Sikhs were attacked in Peshawar, 10,000 Khidmatgar members actively helped protect their lives and property.  When communal riots broke out in Bihar in 1946-1947, Khan toured with Gandhi to bring about peace.  AAlthough the character of the movement was intensely Islamic ... one of the objectives of the organization was the promotion of Hindu-Muslim unity, Bondurant observes.  A strong proponent of a united India with Hindus and Muslims living in peace, Abdul Ghaffar was deeply disappointed by the carnage that followed upon partition.  Although the Khidmatgars were an Islamic movement, non-Muslims were accepted if they were willing to accept the movement’s ideals and discipline.  Abdul Ghaffar maintained close bonds with Hindus even after partition, which led to his being imprisoned in Pakistan on accusations of being Apro-India.

During the early years of the non-cooperation program, Abdul Ghaffar Khan sent his own children to the village schools that he founded, although he could have afforded better education.  He felt that only if his own children were educated in the primitive facilities of the village schools could he counter criticism of the schools’ material poverty.  After Partition, he sent his daughters and granddaughters to the Jesus and Mary convent school in Murree.  In a 1995 interview on Pakistani television, his eldest son, Abdul Ghani Khan, a leading Pashto poet, commented: AWhenever Father went to the convent to see them, he used to sit and talk to the Mother Superior and all the sisters.  He had great love and admiration for them.  He used to say they are wonderful people, they will not get married, they have no ambitions, they just want to serve.

5. ASomething larger than oneself

In the 1990s, Mukulika Banerjee, a lecturer in anthropology at University College London, spent months with Khan’s family and interviewed 70 Khidmatgar members. She reports that while people initially joined the organization due to Abdul Ghaffar’s charisma, later on it the excitement of becoming part of something larger than themselves. Their commitment to nonviolence was stronger than their allegiance to Khan. In 1938, Gandhi asked some members of the movement if they would take up violence if Ghaffar Khan ordered them to, they replied emphatically ANo!

The principles of the Khuda-i Khidmat are well-expressed in the oath taken by new members:
• I am a Servant of God: as God needs no service, serving his creation is serving Him.
• I promise to serve humanity in the name of God.
• I promise to refrain from violence and from taking revenge.
• I promise to forgive those who oppress me or treat me with cruelty.
• I promise to refrain from taking part in feuds and quarrels and from creating enmity.
• I promise to treat every Pathan as my brother and friend.
• I promise to refrain from antisocial customs and practices.
• I promise to live a simple life, to practice virtue, and to refrain from evil.
• I promise to practice good manners and good behavior and not to lead a life of idleness.
• I promise to devote at least two hours a day to social work.

6. A Pathan nationalist in Pakistan

Abdul Ghaffar was nominated a member of the Congress Party working committee in 1931, but his commitment to non-violence led him to resign from the party in 1940 when the Congress extended conditional support to England during World War II.  He was once again imprisoned in 1944 for his continued opposition to the war.  In defending his decision to withdraw from the Congress, Abdul Ghaffar reaffirmed absolute non-violence as a way of life:

Some recent resolutions of the working Committee indicate that they are restricting the use of non-violence to the fight for India’s freedom against constituted authority... I should like to make it clear that the non-violence I have believed in and preached to my brethren of the Khudai-Khidamatgars is much wider.  It affects all our life, and only that has permanent value... The Khudai-Khidmatgars must, therefore, be what our name implies, servants of God and humanity by laying down our own lives and never taking any life... 

In the final years of the raj, the Khitmatgars opposed partition.  When communal riots broke out following the announcement of the Partition Plan in 1946, Abdul Ghaffar visited riot-torn Bihar  as part of a delegation to seek peace.  Refusing to have anything to do with Partition, the Khidmatgars boycotted the July, 1947, referendum held to seek the opinion of the people of the Northwest Frontier Province about whether or not they should join Pakistan.

The carnage that followed Partition and the assassination of Gandhi were events that deeply troubled Abdul Ghaffar.  To the end of his life, he continued to believe that partition was a mistake that could have been avoided.  He refused to break his ties with India or to take part in the ongoing enmity between India and Pakistan.  This led him to be considered pro-Indian by Pakistani authorities and he was repeatedly imprisoned for his outspoken criticism of successive governments.

A second cause of conflict between Abdul Ghaffar and the Pakistani authorities was the status of the Pathan homeland within the state of Pakistan.  Taking advantage of the weak Afghan King Abdur Rahman Khan, the British in 1895 had forced a new border between Afghanistan and British India.  Known as the Durand Line, the border cut the Pathan homeland in two, ignoring traditional tribal regions and bringing Peshawar and the Peshawar valley under British sovereignty.  After partition and the establishment of the state of Pakistan, Afghanistan demanded a return to pre-1895 borders and the inclusion of Peshawar within Afghan borders. 

Abdul Ghaffar supported the Afghan proposal on the grounds of reunification of the Pathan homeland, a position which was viewed as treasonous by Pakistan.  The issue, which remained a bone of contention between the Pakistan and Afghanistan for over 30 years, led not only to Abdul Ghafar’s frequent imprisonment, but to a concerted effort by Pakistani authorities to erase all memory of the Pathan nationalist Khuda-i Khidmat movement.  The history and achievements of the movement were not permitted to be taught in schools or spoken of on television.

Although Abdul Ghaffar’s journal Pakhtoon was suppressed by the Pakistani regime in 1947, a year later he founded and became first president of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party.  In 1956, together with other nationalist leaders, he founded the National Awami Party, which was banned in 1958.  Once again arrested, in 1962, he was declared Prisoner of the Year by Amnesty International.  Still refusing to recognized the validity of the Durand Line which cut the Pathan homeland in two, he settled in the Pathan region of Afghanistan between 1964-1971.  After returning to Pakistan, he was jailed again in 1975 and once again, at the age of 93, in 1983.

7. The significance of Abdul Ghaffar

Evaluating the achievements of someone who has had such significant impact on the history of a nation and his people, extending over a period of so many years, is not an easy task.  Yet the life of Abdul Ghaffar demands such an evaluation.  Several elements of such an evaluation seem particularly important.

1. Neither the habit of violent response to conflict nor that of peacemaking and forgiveness is an innate and unalterable feature of human nature.  Either way of acting can be built taught, and either can be changed or fall into disuse.  Abdul Ghaffar was successful in overcoming a longstanding tendency to settle tribal feuds by local warfare by educating people and providing them with the tools and motivation to find viable alternatives to violent resolution.  By calling upon the Islamic invitation to forgiveness and reconciliation and appealing to ethnic pride and solidarity, he was able to convince his fellow Pathans that violence was not the only or even the most effective solution to human conflict.  Like Gandhi, he was able to teach that even political goals could be better achieved through a comprehensive adherence to concerted effort and non-violent discipline.  In this, he showed that no nation is a slave to its past and that time-honored attitudes and habits of violence can be changed.

On the other hand, subsequent history of the Pathan peoples in the Northwest Frontier Province and Afghanistan shows that the lessons taught Abdul Ghaffar and accepted for a time by his people had no lasting effect.  Perhaps no nation in Asia in the past 40 years has suffered more than Afghanistan from the recourse to a series of armed conflicts.  Extreme positions of left and right, secular and religious, have dominated the political, social and military scene and left the country divided and in ruins.  Reliance on questionable influence from foreign interests, whether from the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the U.S.A., has served to eradicate from public life the principles of solidarity, self-reliance, and pacifist discipline that were instilled by Abdul Ghaffar.  It would seem that non-violence is an ideal that must be taught anew to each generation if it is to be sustained over a period of time.

2. Abdul Ghaffar was neither the first nor the last to interpret Islam as a religion that espouses and teaches the principles of non-violence, but he was one of the few who succeeded in translating this conviction into a mass movement.  His understanding of jihad as the struggle to work in non-violent ways for justice, freedom, and human dignity on Islamic principles is one that inspires individual Muslims, but is still awaiting committed, charismatic personalities like Abdul Ghaffar to shape the thinking and actions of popular movements that can affect history.  The Islamic principles of Alove, service, and faith, self-restraint and forgiveness enunciated by Abdul Ghaffar are much needed if the Islamic umma is to fulfill its destiny to be rahmat lil->âlamîn, Aa mercy for the universe.

3. The significance of Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the recent history of peace activism is his conviction of the importance of discipline in peacemakers.  Working for peace and building peace run counter to many natural impulses.  When one is a victim of oppression, the normal human instinct is to fight back, to respond to violence with more of the same.  Forgiveness does not come easy, nor does patience or the kind of forbearance that places long-term goals ahead of immediate, spontaneous reactions.  Abdul Ghaffar and the Khidmatgars were able to counter these natural impulses only by a comprehensive and consistent commitment to non-violence which adopted self-discipline as the communal bond that enabled them to be strong, patient and forbearing even in the face of brutal violence.

4. Finally, the story of Abdul Ghaffar shows that hope can arise in surprising places.  Courageous individuals with a vision can make an impact and transform history.  At the present moment in history when polarization and the recourse to war and terrorism seem to dominate the policies of world leaders and opposition movements, the example of Abdul Ghaffar offers a way out of the destructive and self-destructive cycle of violence and counter-violence.  I close, as I began, with a reference to Abdul Ghaffar’s funeral in Jalalabad.  It has been described as Athe world’s longest funeral procession, with over 20 kilometers of bumper-to-bumper traffic - cars, buses, and truckloads of villagers, tribesmen on horseback, thousands of mourners on foot - all paying final homage to this man who offered a genuine alternative to a violent world. r these natural impulses only by a comprehensive and consistent commitment to non-violence which adopted self-discipline as the communal bond that enabled them to be strong, patient and forbearing even in the face of brutal violence.