Islam is the Religion of Peace - Khudai Khidmatgar and Nonviolent Resistance

Book Reviewed:
The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier (World Anthropology Series)

This is the first and last time you will ever see or hear the term Khudai Khidmatgar, although they were critical to the Indian nonviolent movement to throw the British out of India in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s. At the time, the British controlled what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Gandhi’s Indian National Congress would need the cooperation of the Moslems in the NW Frontier (now Pakistan) to drive the British out. Gandhi got the help in the form of a leader named Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, aka Badshah Khan, and his nonviolent movement called Khudai Khidmatgar.

In the PATHAN UNARMED, Mukulika Banerjee reviews a brief and shining moment of some 40 years, where the most fearsome warriors in Islam, the Pathan of what is now Pakistan, embraced nonviolence in the service of freedom, and joined ranks with the India National Congress.

Let me draw a distinction between pacifist and passivist. One steps in and pacifies an unjust and chaotic situation, like, say, colonialism. The other sits back and accepts colonialism. Gandhi pacified the British, destroyed their will and ability to fight, and succeeded. Tolstoy advised the Russians to learn from Gandhi, certainly Martin Luther King followed Gandhi’s game plan. Badshah Khan came to the same conclusion as Gandhi, at the same time, initiated a Moslem version of the pacifism, and arrived at Moslem rational for nonviolence, and called it Khudai Khidmatgar, grounded in the code of the Pakhtunwali.

Badshah Khan embraced the warrior culture of the Pakhtun, especially the premium put on courage. By one teaching his followers were not to carry even a walking stick, because it might deflect a blow from a policeman, and lessen the injury received. He extended the warrior ethic beyond the physical to the spiritual, and made jihad a matter of results gained from self-control in the face of oppression, and made mujahadeen synonmous with nonviolence. The philosophy and theology was strictly Moslem. It worked.

The story of the development of the philosophy and its spread, the recruiting and training is fascinating. Camps were set up, schools organized, much like the Indians were doing. Sadly the British were so doubtful that Moslems could conceive of nonviolence, they believed this was a ruse to raise and army of violent warriors instead of the nonviolent. The British cracked down on the Khudai Khidmatgar with a ferocity on par with the Nazis dealing with resistance. The way Banerjee, a Hindi, tells it, the Moslems suffered far more far longer than the Indians for their freedom. Yet in the face of horrific odds these nonviolent Moslems held to their convictions.

Today in Pakistan a US puppet has taken dictatorial powers, moderates are imprisoned, tortured or disappeared, and government soldiers are rooting out “militants” in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. The way Banerjee tells it, Khudai Khidmatgar and the Badshah Khan are still highly revered among the people. I heard about this book from a expert on Islam, tired of the cartoon caricatures of Moslems fed by the government-contolled media. Indeed, one would expect diversity among 1/4 of the world’s population. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear stories every day about the Khudai Khidmatgar freeing Pakistan from foreign control, again?

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