Reply #10: Badsha Khan, non-violent Pathan warrior [View All]

[eridani]

This guy should be as well known as his comrade in arms Ghandhi, but unfortunately is not.

http://www.monitor.upeace.org/innerpg.cfm?id_article=93

Badshah Khan was progressively drawn to involvement in the struggle for independence and sought inspiration from the nonviolent tradition of Islam, which he claimed had been present in that creed but had been forgotten. “There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or Pathan like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence. It is not a new creed. It was followed fourteen hundred years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca, and it has since been followed by all those who wanted to throw off the oppressor’s yoke. But we had so far forgotten it that when Ghandhiji placed it before us, we thought he was sponsoring a novel creed.”

Badsha Khan set about setting up his own nonviolent army, Khudai Khidmatgars or “Servants of God” in 1929-30. As with Gandhi, the ”simple life” went hand in hand with nonviolence and anti-imperialism, and non-violence as a method was directed against Pathan violence as much as British violence. When the Pathans wanted weapons he would say “I am going to give you a weapon…It is the weapon of the Prophet…that weapon is patience and righteousness…If you exercise patience, victory will be yours.”

For two years after the formation of the Khudia Khidmtagars, Pathans died without fighting back violently, and Badshah Khan’s movement swelled to eighty thousand, many showing astonishing bravery in the face of British atrocities. He was arrested and then banished. He chose to spend his exile at Gandhi’s ashram and the two men became close. In the end British India did not stay together as we know, and Gandhi died of violence. Badshah Khan lived well into his nineties, dying in 1988, having spent thirty years on and off in prison. He never faltered either in his opposition to foreign rule nor in his resolve of the power of nonviolence