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.

-DURING THE EARLY YEARS of the Second World War, I was a graduate student at the University of Nagpur. Lying it does near the geographical center of India, Nagpur is a major junction for trains coming from every direction: from Madras in the south, Bombay in the west, Calcutta in the east, and Delhi in the north.

But the real center of India at the time was Sevagram ashram, near a town called Wardha about ninety miles to the south of Nagpur, where Mahatma Gandhi lived with his closest followers. The Leaders of India’s independence movement visited often to seek guidance, and the working committee of the Indian National Congress party met there frequently.
The result was that the whole constellation of India’s leaders passed through my city of Nagpur on their way to Wardha. On weekends I used to go down to the railway station to see the men and Women who were leading our country to freedom.

I saw them all: Jawaharlal Nehru, who become our first prime minister; Sardar Patel, later our first home minister and Gandhi’s trusted lieutenant; Mualan Azad, the great Muslim leader. I remember the austere Archarya Kirpalani eating a bagful of potato chips. I saw Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, a talented poet and dedicated patriot; C. V. Rajagopalachari, a brilliant lawyer and statesman; Rajendra Prassad, who become India’s first president-and, on one special occasion, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.

Badshah Khan had become a real favorite of mine. Stepping down form the third-class carriage, this majestic Pathan from India’s North-West Frontier Province looked something of a giant to me. His many years in prison had taken their toll, but his six-foot-three-inch frame still looked powerful and he carried it with a stately grace. Yet he was so reserved, so unassuming, even childlike. There was a simplicity about him that made me want to sit down with him and have a quiet chat.

I did not have the nerve to approach him on that occasion. I was young and reticent myself. But that brief encounter confirmed everything I believed of him. Of all the brilliant leaders around Gandhi, Badshah Khan was the one who most appealed to me because he not only understood Gandhi’s teaching but followed them completely. Formerly a wealthy landowner, he had handed his holdings over to his sons and dedicated his life to the service of God and his own impoverished people. Clothed in simple homespun cotton, carrying only a small bag with him, he looked more like a fakir, a religious renunciate, than the renowned leader of one hundred thousand nonviolent Pathans.

Shortly after I saw him, Badshah Khan showed his true mettle. It was a period of great anxiety for Indians because the Japanese had advanced to within a thousand miles of our eastern border, seemingly poised to attack. The Congress Working Committee met at Wardha and, in their first open opposition to Gandhi, declared that India must be prepared to defend itself militarily. But Badshah Khan would not go along. He resigned immediately, explaining that his nonviolence was not a policy, to be used when expedient, but an article of faith. For him, as for Gandhi, nonviolence had become a way of life, when the Working Committee changed its position, Badshah Khan and Gandhi rejoined it on their own terms.
I confess that at the time it bothered me a great deal that among all those leaders who were eager to follow Gandhi into the independence struggle, only a few like Badshah Khan were willing to follow his lead in other matters. Perhaps that is why he came to occupy such a large part of my affection. He had joined Gandhi in 1919 without conditions, and since that time nothing ever changed his resolve to stick by him and put his teachings into practice. I admired the other Indian leaders, but most of them did not fully understand the spiritual basis of Gandhi’s work-and honestly admitted it. Badshah Khan not only understood, he lived to the letter what Gandhi taught.

For some time, I had been trying to understand the source of Gandhi’s power. How had such a small man become such a powerhouse? Badshah Khan offered a clue, for he was obviously following Gandhi’s spiritual disciplines as well as his politics.

It took me along, long time to understand that the answer lay in Gandhi’s renunciation of every self-centered impulse in his personality: as he put it, in “reducing himself to zero.” For years the idea made little sense to me. But Badshah Khan’s words were simpler: what drew him to Gandhi, he used to say, was Gandhi’s ability to submit his will to God. This gave me a clue. Badshah Khan’s heroic, decades-long efforts to forget himself in the service of God through the service of his people were a vivid illustration of how the deepest human resources can be released in anyone with the discipline and courage to dig for them.

When India gained independence, Badhshah Khan’s Pathan homelands became part of Pakistan. There, as in British India, he spent much of his time in prison as he continued to press for the same basic rights for his people. When I moved to the United States I lost track of him, except on those rare occasions when the world took note. In 1962, Amnesty International drew attention to his plight by naming him Prisoner of the year. Twenty years later, learning that he had been jailed yet again in Peshawar at the age of ninety-three, I tried to do what was within my own reach to place him in the world’s eyes, getting him nominated for the Nobel Prize and writing this book. Reviewers were fascinated by the story, and Badshah Khan got-full-page treatment in a sensitive piece in the New Yorker when I was interviewed for “Talk of the Town.” But it all seemed written on water.
Yet the world was changing. In 1979 the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, bringing that unfortunate pawn in the “Great Game” back into global affairs after a century of obscurity. The Pathans found themselves celebrated in the news as guerrilla “freedom fighters.” Thus, when Abdul Ghaffar Khan died on January 20, 1988, at the age of ninety-eight, he finally gained the attention of the world’s wire services and the New York Times.
On the day of his funeral, Soviet-held Afghanistan opened its border to Pakistan for the first time since the occupation to allow thousands of Pathan mourners to walk seventy miles over the Khyber Pass carrying Badshah Khan’s coffin to his home in Islamabad, where he had asked to be buried. Inside Afghanistan the mourners were joined by thousands more, while the Pathan guerillas declared a day’s cease-fire so that all could honor this “king of khans.” Like Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan brought people together even in his death.

But only for a day. Soon after this the Soviet army pulled out; but today, ten years later, the massacres of civil war continue. The Taliban-themselves mostly Pathans-have not brought peace. They and rival guerilla factions still bomb each other by turns, taking countless innocent lives among women and children.

These are people noted for their courage, who would rather die than be driven to submission. No outside power is going to force them to lay down their guns. Peace can only be made by the Afghans themselves-which requires even higher courage than killing. Gandhi was once asked if he really thought nonviolence was the best way to resolve conflicts. “No,” he replied. “Nonviolence is not the best way. It is the only way.” Violence provokes more violence. Only what Gandhi called “the nonviolence of the brave” can break this cycle and move the hearts of the violent to peace.

Even now this can be done. Badshah Khan is not dead. His example is a living force which can come to life to inspire and lead people wherever they turn to nonviolence with faith and courage.

This is not a message merely for Afghanistan. Wherever civil war or ethnic violence rages, but especially in the Middle East, Badshah Khan offers a path to peace. A devout Muslim, he showed in his life a face of Islam which non Islamic countries seldom see, proving that within the scope of Islam exists a noble alternative to violence. His nonviolence army, the “Servants of God,” was entirely Muslim, and based upon the ancient Islamic principles of universal brotherhood, submission to God, and the service of God through the service of His creatures.

“It is my inmost conviction,” Badshah Khan said, “that Islam is amal, yakeen, muhabbat”-selfless service, faith, and love. Yakeen, faith, is an unwavering belief in the spiritual laws that underlie all life, and in the nobility of human nature-in particular, in the ability of every human being to respond to spiritual laws. It implies a profound belief in the power of muhabbat, love, to transform human affairs, as Badshah Khan, like Gandhi, demonstrated with his life. This is not the sentimental notion of love portrayed in films. It is a spiritual force which, when drawn upon systematically, can root out exploitation and transform anger into love in action.

Badshah Khan based his life and work on this profound principle, raising an army of courageous men and women who translated it into action. Where his example better known, the world might come to recognize that the highest religious values of Islam are deeply compatible with a nonviolence that has the power to resolve conflicts even against heavy odds.

In Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, Iraq and Iran and the Balkans, select groups of nonviolent freedom fighters can march into opposing territories just as Mahatma Gandhi did in India’s epic Salt March in 1930. As with any other kind of fighting, this requires training-strenuous inner training of the mind, the heart, the will. It cannot be done without faith and courage. Fortunately, in every great religion there are powerful spiritual disciplines that can provide the basis of such training. Badshah Khan’s legacy to the world was to show how this can be done within Islam.

Nearly seventy years have passed since the Salt March, but the world remains blind to the power of nonviolence, which could end war once and for all. This book is dedicated to the men and women who can take humanity further by practicing war without violence.

---EKNATH EASWARAN