At the height of the movement, the Red Shirts were 100,000 strong.

(111-112)  They called themselves Khudai Khidmatgars, "Servants of God."  Their motto was freedom, their aim, service.  Since God himself needed no service, they would serve his people.

The Khudai Khidmatgars, under the leadership of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, became history's first professional nonviolent army - and its most improbable.  Any Pathan could join, provided he took the army's oath:

I am a Khudai Khitmatgar;  and as God needs no service, but serving his creation is serving him, I promise to serve humanity in the name of God.

I promise to refrain from violence and from taking revenge.  I promise to forgive those who oppress me or treat me with cruelty.

I promise to refrain from taking part in feuds and quarrels and from creating enmity.

I promise to treat every Pathan as my brother and friend.

I promise to refrain from antisocial customs and practices.

I promise to live a simple life, to practice virtue and to refrain from evil.

I promise to practice good manners and good behavior and not to lead a life of idleness.  I promise to devote at least two hours a day to social work.

Women were recruited too, and played an important role in the struggles to come....

While an autumn breeze [October 1938] cooled the air around them, the Red Shirts explained to the Mahatma that their nonviolence was absolute.  Unbending.

Gandhi looked skeptical.  Didn't their nonviolence depend upon Badshah Khan?

No.  Even if Khan himself - God forbid - should renounce nonviolence, they would adhere.

Gandhi smiled.  He liked their childlike bluster.  Weren't they being overbold?  But he answered himself before they could respond.  "No, I will take you at your word.'

The real question on his mind was whether they fully understood what nonviolence meant.  It was relatively easy, he said, to maintain a passive nonviolence when you were faced with a fully armed opponent.  You had no choice - you simply resisted.  That was nonviolence of the weak.

The officers looked to Khan, puzzled.  Had Gandhi heard about Qissa Khawani Bazaar and the Kohat shootings and the raid on Utmanzai...?   "What about nonviolence among yourselves?" Gandhi went on, before anyone else could speak.  "What about among your own weak villagers when there is nothing to check your force except your own discipline and will?"

The bearded heads were still.  Finally one officer said he did not understand what Gandhi meant by nonviolence of the strong.

"I mean," Gandhi said, "that you feel stronger - not weaker - for having renounced your knives and rifles."  If they did not feel stronger, he added, then it was better that they take up their rifles again and fight like the brave soldiers he knew them to be.

"A charge has been often leveled against me and Badshah Khan," he explained:  "that we are rendering India and Islam a disservice by presenting the gospel of nonviolence to the brave and warlike people of the Frontier.  They say that I have come here to sap your strength.  The Frontier Province, they say, is the bastion of Islam in India.  The Pathans are past masters in the use of the sword and the rifle, and mine is an attempt to emasculate them by making them renounce their arms and thus undermine the citadel of the strength and security of Islam.'

The officers snorted, whispering curses to themselves.  What did outsiders know about the Khudai Khitmatgars, who had withstood the bayonets and bullets and tortures rained upon them during the last satyagraha?

"I repudiate the charge," Gandhi said, answering his own question.  "my faith is that by adopting nonviolence you will in fact be rendering a lasting service to India and to Islam itself.  Yours will be the spiritual strength with which you can not only protect Islam but even other religions."

Gandhi suggested that Khan begin to train the volunteers in the Constructive Program.  He had seen little evidence of it in the province.  Pathans knew how to fight nonviolently, Gandhi said;  there was no doubt.  Now Khan had to teach them how to live nonviolently - a more difficult task, because it lacked the glamour of fighting.  Peace would always be less compelling than war.  Perhaps that was why there was so little of it in the world.

Satya means truth in Sanskrit, and agraha comes from a Sanskrit root meaning "to hold on to," which Gandhi used as a synonym for "force."  Thus satyagraha carries a double meaning:  it signifies a determined holding on to, a grappling with truth;  while at the same time it implies the forces that arises from that grappling, what Gandhi called"soul-force."  Satyagraha stands for both the means and the ends, the struggle and the force that is generated in that struggle.

As heat is generated by friction, Gandhi contended, power is released from within the depths of the human spirit in its struggle toward truth.  The raw material for this power is passion.  "I have learned through bitter experience," Gandhi explained, "the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world."  In this "truth-struggling" nothing is lost or repressed;  energy is conserved and transmuted.  Thus in its transformative aspect nonviolence is not nonviolence at all, but violence transmuted, harnessed, used.  We could more properly call it trans_violence, where the power of passions like anger, hatred, and fear is reshaped into a potent fighting force.

Since Islam is so poorly understood in the West, it may be helpful to give some explanation of how Khan can speak of nonviolence as the "weapon of the Prophet."  _Sabr, often inadequately translated as "patience" or "endurance," is counselled repeatedly in the Meccan suras of the Koran, but the context makes it clear that if a one-word translation were possible, "satyagraha" comes closest to what is meant.  The reference is to the early years of the Prophet's teaching in Mecca, when he and his few followers ahd to endure torment ranging from ridicule to the harshest persecution.  Their stance was consistently to "hold on to truth," the literal meaning of satyagraha, without either retaliating or retreating, in perfect submission (islam) to God's truth and the consequences of their faith.

Sabr is all this and more:  it means tenacity in a righteous cause, cheerful resignation in misfortune, forgiveness, self-control, renunciation, refraining from revenge, "bowing before the blow without a sound or complaint."  One saying is reminiscent of Gandhi:  "Sabr is revealed at the first blow."  An epigram attributed to Umar suggests the high value ascribed tot his virtue in some circles in medieval Islam:  "We have found the best of our life in sabr."  In the mystics, particularly al-Ghazzali, sabr becomes a cardinal virtue in the "holy war" (jihad) between good and evil that every human being is called upon to wage in his or her own heart.  (Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam, s.v. "sabr")

Sabr is not Khan's nonviolent resistance, of course,  It was his genius to extend its meaning to the renunciation of all retaliation by the strong.

My Life and Struggle by Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Delhi:  Hind Pocket Books, 1969

Abdul Ghaffar Khan:  Faith Is a Battle by DG Tendulkar
Bombay:  Gandhi Peace Foundation (Popular Prakashan), 1967

Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North West Frontier by Mukulika Banerjee
Santa Fe, NM:  School of American Research Press, 2000

Can't We Be Like Abdul Ghaffar Khan?

Previous diaries:
WarPeace
Nonviolence:  25 Lessons
Solar Swadeshi
Unknown Auschwitz Satyagraha

According to a recent search, there have been 29 stories and diaries on dkos in the last five years which include the word "satyagraha."

Peace would always be less compelling than war.  Perhaps that was why there was so little of it in the world.