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1890—20 January 1988

Servant of God

In 1921, thirty-one-year-old Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was behind bars for defying British colonial law. His crime was working for educational reform in remote villages of present-day Pakistan. When the magistrate questioning him expressed doubt about Khan’s professed loyalty to nonviolence, Khan replied that he was a follower of Mohandas Gandhi. “And what if you’d never heard of Gandhi?” he was asked. The tall, muscular Khan startled the magistrate by effortlessly pulling the iron bars apart. He was sentenced to three years.

Khan was born into a wealthy and devout Muslim family in the Pathan village of Utmanzai. Despite the Pathan tradition of blood feuds and honor killings, which made the tribe one of the most violent in British India’s Northwest Frontier, Khan’s father struggled to live peacefully and to instill an aversion to violence in his son. He raised Khan to see Islam as a religion that advocated harmony and reconciliation.

The roots of Khan’s nonviolence thus lay explicitly in his religious faith. He was convinced not only that the basic message of Islam is peace, but that this message of peace was the key to reconciliation with all other faiths as well. As an adult, Khan’s openness to other religious perspectives made him a close friend and collaborator of Gandhi. Together the two worked to reconcile Hindus and Muslims in their common quest for independence from the British Raj.

One of the most dramatic expressions of Khan’s devotion to nonviolence was his 1924 founding of the Khudai Khidmatgars, or “Servants of God,” a nonviolent army of Pathans whose members took an oath to serve “humanity in the name of God, to refrain from violence and revenge, and to forgive those who oppressed them or treated them with cruelty.” The Servants of God, who eventually numbered approximately one hundred thousand, boasted all the trappings of a regular army. They wore uniforms, formed regiments, and trained and drilled. But their training was in nonviolent resistance and their weapons were patience and righteousness, which, according to Khan, “no power on earth can stand against.” The Servants of God were at hundreds of strikes and public demonstrations against the British rulers of India to protect participants from British soldiers. British repression of them was particularly severe, in part because of the Pathans’ legendary ferocity as warriors. In 1930, after one of Khan’s periodic arrests by the authorities, the British killed three hundred of them as they conducted a nonviolent protest. Their resilient dedication to nonviolence and their courage amazed even Gandhi.

After India’s independence in 1947 and subsequent separation from Pakistan, Khan worked with the new country to encourage the growth of democratic institutions. But he proved a thorn in the side of Pakistani leaders who wished to make the nation a military power. Repeatedly arrested and imprisoned—he once sadly noted that he had been treated more humanely in British prisons than in Pakistani ones—he became a worldwide symbol of the prisoner of conscience. Three years before his death, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.