Islam’s Peaceful Warrior: Abdul Ghaffar Khan

It is better to die than to fight back. This is the message of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a great leader in the nonviolent tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But while King was a devout Christian and Gandhi was a devout Hindu, Ghaffar Khan was a devout Muslim who taught that being a Muslim means complete submission to God's will. He taught that a Muslim never hurts another person, that men and women are completely equal, and that God gives victory to those who refuse to fight. He believed that God requires complete nonviolence from every Muslim, and that this submission to God's will gives enormous power to the individual and to the Muslim community.Khan was a tribal chief, the son of a Pashtun chief, and he was an enormous, powerful man who stood more than 6'3" tall. He was born in about 1890 in the far northwestern mountains of what is Pakistan today, near Peshawar. At that time Pakistan was a part of India, and India was a colony of Great Britain. As a boy growing up, he saw that his people, the Pashtuns, suffered terribly from violence in their lives. Every week he heard stories about murder and revenge, done because of ancient tribal customs. His schoolteacher beat the students often. It seemed there was violence and pain everywhere. Even as a child, he hated the inequality and violence of the world around him.Yet traditional values tempted him too. He even enlisted to become an officer in the Queen's Corps of Guides, an elite British army unit. But he was also proud of being a Pashtun. When he saw a British officer insult an Indian friend, he resigned his commission and left the army.By 1920, the Indian independence movement was growing strong. The Indians wanted toforce the English to stop ruling over them. A new leader, Gandhi, was teaching that by staying nonviolent when the British beat them, the Indians could become more powerful than the British and force them to leave.While Gandhi was working in the lowlands of India, Ghaffar K