At first he did not understand these feelings. Social reform was not characteristic of the Pathans; it was a British notion. Although the mullah railed at the sinful, decadent foreigners, they remained firmly in their grip: the Raj protected the iron rule of the mullahs over the villagers, and in return the mullahs discouraged any social or political reform.
Young Khan knew all this. He knew that any attempt to improve the lot of his people would be discouraged, even harassed. In the moral life of the Pathan, the world belonged to those who were strong enough to take what they could hold: mercy and generosity were left to Allah. But although he wondered where it came from, the twenty-year-old farmer felt the need to serve.



One afternoon, working in the fields behind the farmhouse, Ghaffar Khan was thinking about the Reverend Wigram, his old schoolmaster. In the silence of the summer air, an ancient proverb chimed. Kharbuza ra kharbuza dida rang me girad: “When a melon sees another melon, it takes on its color.” Ghaffar had spent years watching the unassuming brothers at the Mission. The color of their love and generosity must have rubbed off, he decided-the melon will take its color as it will. Very well, then: he would serve.
But how? And where? Certainly no help would come from the mullahs. Who was he-a twenty-year-old Muhammadzai farm boy, not even matriculated from high school-to uplift an ancient, noble people?

Well, he was just that, a Muhammadzai-a child of the prophet himself. What more did he need? He could read. He could write. He knew farming. All rights, then, he would start a school.

“I know these men,” wrote George Nathaniel Cuzon of Kedleston:

They are brave as lions, wild as cats; docile as children…It is with a sense of pride that one receives the honest homage of these magnificent Samsons, gigantic, bearded, and instinct with loyalty, often stained with crime.

Lord Curzon meant every word he wrote about the Pathans. He admired them, but he had no illusions about them. In 1899 he was appointed as viceroy of India precisely because he knew more about the Pathans than any other man in England-and because he had a plan to Pathan-proof the Frontier. Between the risings of 1897, when the Tirah was devastated, and 1910, when Ghaffar Khan started his first school, much had changed on the Frontier, and most of the changes were due to the plans of the energetic and resolute Cusrzon.
The savage outburst of the Frontier wars of the 1890s made it clear to the British that they were sitting atop a powder keg that threatened to explode at the very gateway to the Indian Empire. As long as the Frontier could erupt in violence at the whim of any crazed mullah, it would be vulnerable to Russian intrigue. The forward policy had checked external threats, but internally the Frontier was still vulnerable. India’s security was at stake. As viceroy, Curzon knew that the security of the Indian Empire was his paramount duty, and the intended to let nothing-not even his admiration for “magnificent Samsons”-stand in its way.

Curzon’s plan put the Frontier directly under the control of the viceroy in Delhi. Crucial decisions could be made swiftly at the least sign of disturbance. The hill tribes remained isolated from the settled districts; settled Pathans like Ghaffar Khan could not even enter the tribal areas without permission. Vivisection of the Pathan nation was complete.
Included in Curzon’s plan was a standing army of ten thousand men that girded the province along a two hundred perimeter, from the Malakand in the north to the southern tip of Waziristan on the Iranian border. More forts were built and railways and roads laid down to move army units quickly to any trouble spot. A six-thousand-man police force maintained peace. The province was declared to be “a sealed book, a hunting ground for the officers of the Political department and the military.”

Lord Curzon also enacted a series of restrictive laws known as the Frontier Crimes Regulation. A man could be “transported”-sent to a foreign penal colony-for life without counsel or trial. Justice was in the hands of the political agent or pro-British land-lords called in to hear cases. The most elementary rights extended to Her Majesty’s subjects throughout the Empire were denied the Pathans. All this confirmed what the Pathans had long suspected: the imperial powers in Delhi and London regarded them as savages.
On November 9, 1901, the North West-Frontier Province came into being. It was in fact an armed garrison, a police state. These were the conditions when Ghaffar Khan opened his school in Utmanzai. Neither he nor Curzon could have imagined that someday the small school would help to undermine the viceroy’s plans.

For several years the Haji Abdul Wahid Saheb of Tarangzai had been working in the villages of Mardan, near Utmanzai, giving religious instruction. He was the Frontier’s first social reformer. Pathans throughout the district knew him as Haji Saheb and regarded him as a saint. He had attracted a dedicated band of young volunteers, and when he heard that a young Muhammadzai had started a school in Utmanzai, he was naturally interested. He guessed that he would find a kindred spirit and invited Khan to come to Mardan.
Ghaffar’s school had been an instant success. The mullahs had always urged villagers to boycott the British schools, but they had offered no real alternative. The more liberal Pathans began to take notice of the school in Utmanzai. Khan and a co worker, Abdul Aziz, started several more like it in surrounding villages, and in a short time they had enrolled a large number of students.

Less sympathetic interests took notice too. Khan’s fledgling schools caught the ever watchful eye of the British, who did not want an awakened peasantry on the Frontier. In addition, the mullahs saw him as a competitor. If villagers became too educated, they might stop giving alms.

Khan tried to reason with them. “Mullah Saheb,” he once pleaded with a priest at Murree as they walked down the main street, “look at that bungalow. What do you think of it?”
“It is very beautiful,” the mullah replied. “I like it.”
“Do you know who the man is who lives there?”
“No, who is he?”
“He is an English mullah. If a country prospers and its people progress, then the priests can also live well. But if we remain ignorant, then you will have to go begging from door to door for your stipend.”
The mullah was not impressed.

“Compare your life to the life of the English priest, Khan suggested. “What a difference!” The priest shrugged. His income was meager, but at least it was certain. Who knew what would happen if too much education were given out?

“My words were wasted on the mullah,” Khan told Abdul Aziz latter. “If God himself could not make him understand, what could I do?”
When Haji Saheb invited Khan to meet him in Mardan, he asked him to start a school for older boys at Gaddai, in the north. Khan accepted at once.
Ghaffar Khan liked the village, and he liked contact with the Haji’s circle of young liberals. Under their influence he began to read more widely. He subscribed to progressive Muslim periodicals like Zamindar and Al-Hilal that were just beginning to appear. A Muslim renaissance was in the making, and its fresh, vigorous breezes were just beginning to stir Muslim in India.

The British on the Frontier were feeling the breeze too. They blacklisted anyone who read Al-Hilal. Under the Frontier Crimes Act public meetings were illegal except in mosques, so khan and the Haji Saheb’s co-workers were forced to move about the province secretly.
All this activity was making Behram Khan uneasy. His two daughters were well married; his eldest son was learning medicine in England. But his youngest son had resigned a commission in the Guides and was spreading education. The old Khan worried. Too many young Pathans had been jailed for lesser offenses, or deported to prison camps on the Andamans in the Indian Ocean-or simply hanged.

Behram Khan’s wife tempered his concern. Ghaffar, she said, was a responsible boy who knew what he was doing. Behram Khan yielded. If his pious wife approved of the boy’s activities, who was he to stand in the way? Still. He decided, life would look different to the boy if he were married and settled. He arranged a marriage to a girl who had caught Ghaffar’s interest, gave them a village to manage, and hoped for the best.

Ghaffar adored his beautiful wife, and in 1913 a son, Ghani, was born. The young Khan began to think that he might enjoy the more regular life of a landlord.
But the restlessness persisted. Holding his infant son in his arms in front of the evening fir, he often felt something stir within him. His thoughts would drift to the impoverished, ignorant villagers of the province. His wife could not understand the long silences and grew to fear these moods. But what could she say?

Abruptly, disaster struck Ghaffar Khan’s dreams. The Haji Saheb decided to fight the British openly. He tried to rally the villagers of Buner to drive the foreigners from their hills. But the Frontier War was still fresh in their minds, and the Haji Saheb found himself caught between the mullahs, who intrigued against him, and the alarmed British. When his arrest appeared imminent, the Haji fled one night to the remoter territories of the Mohmands. He never returned.

For years after, the British would say that their biggest mistake on the Frontier was letting the Haji sahib slip away. But they were not about to risk another full scale war with the Mohamands to get him back.

The Haji’s flight was a catastrophe for twenty- four- year-old Ghaffar Khan. Now only brave young men like him were left to carry on. Who would lead them?
Khan decided to look for help. In 1913 he attended a conference of progressive Muslims at Agra, once the center of Mogul India and still a symbol of the most enlightened aspect of Islamic civilization. There he met Muslim leaders like Maulana Azad who were engaged in the social, educational, and political uplift of backward Muslim populations all over the Indian subcontinent. A year later, at another conference at Deoband, they suggested that Ghaffar Khan try to work among the “free tribes of the hills, where the need for education was greatest.

The hills? Ghaffar explained to these cultured Muslims from Delhi and Lahore that the Frontier Regulations prohibited settled Pathans like himself from even talking with hill tribes. Nevertheless, he agreed, the idea was compelling, and worth a try.

He decided to visit Bajaur, the mountainous district to the north where fifteen years earlier the tribesmen of Mullah Mastun had started the Great Frontier War. The British had no forgotten. They had made the Malakand-like other trouble spots on the Frontier-a “Political Agency,” something of political no-man’s-land. It came under the absolute control of the local political agent, whose word was law-and the British in Delhi made sure that his word would be harsh. Only the most hardened administrators were sent out to the Agencies.

The political agent of the Malakand was a notorious man named Cab. By his ordinance, Pathans had to bow low before any passing Englishman. Any Pathan who failed to do so was locked in stocks in the commons, his dead and feet sticking out through the holes. The entire district was ruled like a feudal fiefdom.

One winter morning, Khan left for Bajaur with a Mohmand colleague. They reached the Malakand Pass at dusk. Police were searching anyone who looked suspicious, and Khan knew he would be stopped and perhaps arrested. He lay down in the back of a horse carriage and covered himself with his long cotton cloth.

It must have been dark, or perhaps the guard was tired. The Tonga driver told him there was no one in the back. He peered for an endless moment at the pile of cotton on the carriage bottom and let it through. Khan’s friend, being a Mohmand, walked right in.

Once they were past the Chakdarra checkpoint, the two left the main road and climbed steep trails toward Bajaur. They walked through cedar forests, then into pines. Friends of the Haji sahib gave them food and rooms to sleep in-at Chamrkand, a small cottage on the edge of the forest, with hives of honey bees droning in the morning sun. Following the creeks of the Panjkora for another day, they reached Bajaur.

Itinerant travelers were not unusual sights, even to these remote, high-country villagers. Wandering mendicants often set themselves up near the village mosque to read the scriptures and tell stories about the saints and seers. But this was no mendicant. It was difficult not to notice him.

Ghaffar thought the small village of Zagai would make a good place to start work. It was remote enough, he thought, to escape undue attention, and the villagers seemed to like him. He sent a message to the plains for other workers to join him. Then he waited.

From near the mosque, on could look out over the pine and cedar forests and into the valleys of Bajaur. There the British watched everyone and everything that passed through. After a few days of waiting, Ghaffar began to wonder if something had happened to his friends. Had they even received his message?
Another day passed. And another.

In the seclusion of the wood, the reality of his situation bore down upon ghaffar Khan. He did not like hiding from the authorities. How could he work under such conditions, when even students were paid by the British to inform on their teachers?

Alone and perplexed, young Ghaffar Khan fell back upon his instincts. He decided to perform a chilla, a fast. If he could not find help outside, he would seek it within himself. He found a small mosque and told his Mohmand friend to wait for him. No, he explained, he did not know what he was going to-do. He hoped to find out.

Khan stayed in the small, dim room for several days, eating nothing. At night he sipped creek water. And he prayed. When his knees tired of kneeling, he sat cross-legged on the prayer carpet.

He sought answers. Should he stay and risk capture? Should he return to the relative safety of Utmanzai? What should he do? Finding no help, he entered into the depths of his consciousness, until the questions stopped.

Franc Bernardone of Assisi was a year older than ghaffar Khan when, seven hundred years earlier, he entered the broken, deserted church of San Damiano to pray and heard a bold, clear voice command him: “Francis, rebuild my church!” obediently he walked out into the countryside to collect some stones and start the repair.
That the impetuous Francis took the command too literally-that “church.” In fact, was meant to indicate an institution for beyond the four walls of that broken structure-did not matter.

Francis mistook the call, but he did not mistake his calling. He knew, however dimly, that the hand of God had rested on his bare shoulder, and that it was lifting him up to a great task.

Laying those undressed stones along the broken wall of San Damiano started Francis of Assisi on a mission that utterly changed the course of his life. Ghaffar Khan was even more reticent about his inner life than Francis was, and in an immediate sense, to judge from his own terse references, his chilla in the mosque at Zagai was clouded and inconclusive. But it can be observed from that point on that his activities and words are stamped with a singleness of purpose-the service of God-that does not alter over the course of eight decades.

It was early morning when Ghaffar Khan ended his fast. He folded his prayer rug under his arm and walked out with the vague but powerful awareness that he was not the same man who had entered the mosque a few days before. He had not received the direct answers he had sought-he still did not know what to do. But he felt a strength he had not known before. And he understood, dimly, that it was the strength of God.

Islam! Inside him, the world began to explode with meaning. Islam! Submit! Surrender to the lord and know His strength! Ghaffar felt swelling within him the desire to serve this great God. And since He needed no service, ghaffar would serve His creatures instead-the tattered villagers who were too ignorant and too steeped in violence to help themselves.

Ghaffar looked down into the valley. There were the British with their stern tyranny, the entrenched Khans, the overly conservative priests. He saw before him only pain and unending labor. But he felt buoyed. Like Francis, he did not fully understand the nature of his calling; but he knew he had been called. He would submit and he would not seek rest in this life.

He swung his prayer carpet over his shoulders and started down the footpath, dodging the broken, peppered granite in his way.

Ghaffar Khan could hardly have suspected that his life now moved along path taken a decade earlier by another subject of the Indian empire, by the time Khan had returned to his village and set about reopening the schools closed by the British after the flight of Haji Saheb, a steamship was carrying Gandhi away from the South Africa, where the forty-five-year-old barrister had concluded history’s first successful nonviolent struggle against imperialism. In South Africa, Gandhi had undergone a transformation of character that utterly altered his life’s purpose. For a decade he had been systematically reforming his lifestyle to transform himself from an affluent lawyer into a disciplined seeker of God. He had thrown all the forces of his powerful personality into the task of reducing every ego-centered drive in him “to zero.” Walking the dry hills of Natal as a stretcher bearer during the Zulu “rebellion” of 1906-another notorious British punitive expedition-he had heard within him the call of selfless service and felt the surge of power that follows the surrender of the human will to an overriding cause.

Gandhi return from his ambulance service acutely aware of a new strength, but still unaware of what he was to do. Within weeks he found himself at the head of a wholly new kind of campaign systematic, nonviolent resistance to discriminatory legislation. Through trial and error, sometimes supported by thousand of Indian laborers, at times only by a handful of friends, Gandhi finally succeeded in winning the basic rights denied his people by the government. In the summer of 1914, confident of the power of his new way of fighting, Gandhi left South Africa to return to India.

The forces released in the Hindu barrister and the Muslim reformers were slowly converging-and they were unlike anything the statesmen and generals of the Raj had ever faced. The British, masters of the arts of diplomacy and war, had conquered a quarter of the earth’s people. But the forces of history were now moving to pit them against something altogether new: Satyagraha, “soul force,” power unleashed from the depths of the human spirit.

India seemed supremely secure that summer of 1914. Most British would have scoffed at the notion that the Raj would collapse in just three decades. Ghaffar Khan would probably have scoffed along with them. Like Gandhi, he had chosen to serve. He did not question the future.