iography of Abdul Ghaffar Khan Provides Lessons for Current Readers

As United States CIA officers continue operations against Afghan warlords in advance of this June's Loya Jirga legislative council, demagogues from Afghanistan to the United States still characterize the war for public observers as a struggle against either 'American imperialism' or 'international terrorism.' Both of these tacks, while they tend to rouse audiences, necessarily pit one side against another. In this light, a 1999 book about the life of a lesser-known peacemaker, which serves as a warning and hopeful challenge to seekers of sovereignty and to anti-terrorists, deserves a second look.

Readers accustomed to tracking the affairs of Pashtun leaders in the daily paper can get to know a remarkable Pashtun peacemaker in Easwaran Eknath's Nonviolent Soldier of Islam. The book tells the story of tribal leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was born in 1890 outside Peshawar and went on to work alongside Mahatma Gandhi. His journey, against the daily skirmishes and negotiations in Afghanistan, provide hope for a devastated country attempting to emerge from more than two decades of warfare.

The son of a village chief, Khan witnessed British forces' repression of an uprising in his home Northwest Frontier province in 1897. Alongside this colonial oppression, devastating cycles of violence precipitated by blood feuds scarred his Pashtun society and made a profound impression on the young Khan. Although a physically strong man with a brilliant mind, he rejected a coveted commission in an elite British Indian army unit and a place to study in England. Instead, he determined to oppose the British oppression of his fellow Afghans. But instead of using weapons of warfare, Khan fought this struggle by providing education.

He traveled throughout rural tribal areas preaching hard work, self-sacrifice and forgiveness, and led efforts to establish schools for peasant children. His work earned him the respect of fellow citizens, who gave him the honorary title 'Badshah Khan' - or Khan of Khans. The British saw him as a threat, however. They censored his schools and imprisoned Khan; in the end, he was to spend one third of his long life in prison.

Over the course of his non-violent campaign, Khan forged a close relationship with Mahatma Ghandi, even becoming known among locals as 'the Frontier Ghandi.' Khan spread Ghandi's civil disobedience movement to the Afghan frontier region, urging his people to return British medals, withdraw from British universities, and stop practicing in British courts.

Perhaps most remarkably to readers accustomed to Taliban-style religious rhetoric, Badshah Khan organized 100,000 uniformed men as the Khudai Khidmatgars, or 'Servants of God' - the world's first professional non-violent army. With regimental discipline, these men foreswore violence and dedicated themselves to education, poverty relief and raising the consciousness of the peasants. The Khudai Khidmagtars formed the key Muslim component of the popular non-violent movement that precipitated the British withdrawal from India.

But Khan's joy was short-lived, for reasons that will also resonate with current readers. A strong advocate of Indian unity, he was appalled at the fighting following independence in 1947 that led to the partition of the sub-continent into Muslim and Hindu states. Nevertheless, he maintained close ties with his Hindu friends, earning the ire of the Pakistani authorities who imprisoned him as 'pro-Indian.' He insisted to the end that Muslims and Hindus were better off together, and deplored tensions between the two states.

Abdul Ghaffar Khan died on January 20 1988, at the age of 98. His funeral led to the first visit of an Indian Prime Minister to Pakistan in three decades. It also occasioned a temporary cease-fire observed by Soviet and mujaheddin forces fighting in Afghanistan, to allow his burial near Jalalabad.

Today, with missiles landing in Jalalabad, this accessible and inspiring account of one of history's greatest peacemakers provides valuable insights to readers concerned with the plight of contemporary Afghanistan. In particular, the book offers four lessons. First, it reminds us that no nation is a slave to its past. The Pashtuns are often caricatured in Western media as a 'warlike people.' However, Badshah Khan shows us that even the most deeply ingrained cycles of violence can be broken once violence itself is disavowed. Second, it challenges the image many have, post-September 11, of Islam as a religion of violence. Badshah Khan was a devout Muslim, but his faith did not lead him to endorse militarism - even in the face of outrages committed against his own people. Rather, he believed that the Prophet Mohammad's life set an example of non-violence. He worked closely with other faith communities, strongly influenced by Ghandi's preaching of Jesus' injunction to 'love your enemy.'

The other two lessons of the book bear on understanding of American, rather than Central Asian, politics. By documenting the terror that British colonialism wrought in the cause of "progress," Eknath reminds us that wars fought in the name of abstractions like "civilization" can be the cruelest of all. Like the British a century earlier, in the past two decades Soviet, Taliban and American forces have wrought great suffering on the people of Afghanistan. Yet all fighters have been convinced they were fighting for noble causes. Finally, Badshah Khan's story teaches that hope can arise from remarkable places. It shows that courageous individuals motivated by love and determination can transform history. In an uncertain moment in the war on terrorism and the development of nations, Eknath's book deserves close reading by a wide audience.