I have one great desire.

I want to rescue these gentle, brave, patriotic people from the tyranny of the foreigners who have disgraced and dishonored them.

I want to create for them a world of freedom, where they can live in peace, where they can laugh and be happy.

I want to kiss the ground where their ruined homes once stood, before they were destroyed by savage strangers.

I want to take a broom and sweep the alleys and the lanes, and I want to clean their houses with my own hands.

I want to wash the stains of blood from their garments.

I want to show the world how beautiful they are, these people from the hills, and then I wan to proclaim: “Show me, if you can, any gentler, more courteous, more cultured people than these.”

BADSHAH KHAN

Nonviolence for the Twenty-first Century

AS THIS BOOK enters its second edition, at the turn of the millennium, the world confronts an ever-widening nuclear arms raced and the terrible loss of life in the Balkans and Africa. No region of the globe is exempt from the scourge of violence. While nations gauge whether to squander their resources on nuclear weapons or the new “poor man’s” arsenals of biological war, fear of different races, religions, nationalities, and ethnic identities continues to fan the flames of hatred and violence around the world.

Badshah Khan offers the twenty-first century a way out. A devout Muslim and devoted ally of Mahatma Gandhi, this true freedom fighter struggled for the rights of his people for almost eighty years without ever wielding a weapon.

“Today’s world is traveling in some strange direction,” he told an interviewer in Afghanistan in 1985. You see that the world is going toward destruction and violence. And the specialty of violence is to create hatred among people and to create fear. I am a believer in nonviolence and I say that no peace or tranquility will descend upon the people of the world until nonviolence is practice, because nonviolence is love and it stirs courage in people.”
In the fervent hope that it may spread the message of this great Muslim leader to every country and language and religion on earth, I offer this little book to the world.

EKNATH EASWARAN