Abdul Ghaffar Khan

Title

Abdul Ghaffar Khan

Artist

Steve Simon

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born in 1890 into a aristocratic Muslim family in the Peshawar Valley of the North-West Frontier Province of India, now Pakistan. This area is home to the Pashtun tribesman known historically for their violent tendencies. Khan was educated by British missionaries and in his last year of high school was offered a highly prestigious commission with an elite corps of Pashtun soldiers serving the British Raj, that is the British rule of India. The young Khan, however, could not pledge his loyalty to a power antithetical to his own people�s welfare and would soon begin opening schools among the impoverished and mostly illiterate Pashtun villagers.

In his late twenties, during a period of fasting and meditation, Khan envisioned a �nonviolent army� of Pashtun tribesman who would renounce the code of violence and revenge so deeply engrained in Pashtun society. His vision would become reality. The army would become known as the Khudai Khidmatgars or Servants of God. They wore red military uniforms, took an oath foreswearing violence and revenge, and devoted themselves to social welfare, education, and ending the rule of the British in what was then undivided India.

A devout practitioner of nonviolence, religious tolerance, women's rights, and social justice, Khan worked to spread his ideals in the region. He toured tirelessly from village to village, traveling twenty-five miles a day, visiting 1,000 villages over a ten-year period. On these visits he spoke of social reform while Khudai Khitmatgar members would stage dramas extolling the virtues of nonviolence, stressing its compatibility with Islam.

In the 1930s and early 40s the British met the Pashtun efforts for independence with massacres, torture, and destruction. Khan, for his part, was imprisoned for fifteen of these years, frequently condemned to solitary confinement, but the Pashtuns, in the face of such bitter repression, never waivered from their commitment to nonviolence. Their persistence was met with success. In 1947, India finally won its long battle for independence and self rule.

For Ghaffar Khan, the victory was bitter sweet. Like Gandhi he was committed to Hindu-Muslim unity and firmly opposed to the creation of Pakistan as a new country for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Gandhi was assassinated within four months of India�s independence by a Hindu nationalist who held Gandhi guilty of favoring the Muslims of newly formed Pakistan. Ghaffar Khan meanwhile for his efforts of unity was targeted by some Pakistanis as being anti-Muslim. He was attacked and hospitalized. In the coming decades his opposition to Pakistan�s nascent political power landed him repeatedly in house arrest and jail before his eventual exile.

Despite many brushes with death due to assassination attempts and ailing health brought on by over three decades of imprisonment, Ghaffar Khan known affectionately as Badshah, or king, lived to the age of ninety-eight. He remained committed to non-violence through it all.

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June 27th, 2015

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