Abdul Ghaffar Khan Biography

Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born in 1890 into an aristocratic Muslim family in the Peshawar Valley of the North-West Frontier Province of India, now Pakistan. This area is home to Pashtun tribesmen known historically for their violent tendencies. Khan was educated by British missionaries. In his last year of high school, he was offered a highly prestigious commission with an elite corps of Pashtun soldiers serving the British Raj (British rule of India). The young Khan, however, could not pledge his loyalty to a power antithetical to his own people’s welfare and would soon begin opening schools among the impoverished and mostly illiterate Pashtun villagers.

In his late twenties, during a period of fasting and meditation, Khan envisioned a “nonviolent army” of Pashtun tribesman who would renounce the code of violence and revenge that was so deeply engrained in Pashtun society. His vision would become reality. The army would become known as the Khudai Khidmatgars or Servants of God. They wore red military uniforms, took an oath foreswearing violence and revenge, and devoted themselves to social welfare, education, and ending the rule of the British in what was then undivided India.

A devout practitioner of nonviolence, religious tolerance, women’s rights, and social justice, Khan worked to spread his ideals in the region. He toured tirelessly from village to village, traveling twenty-five miles a day, visiting 1,000 villages over a ten-year period. On these visits he spoke of social reform while Khudai Khitmatgar members staged dramas extolling the virtues of nonviolence, stressing its compatibility with Islam. 

He toured tirelessly from village to village, traveling twenty-five miles a day, visiting 1,000 villages over a ten-year period.

The results of Ghaffar Khan’s efforts were truly incredible. He and Mohandas Gandhi traveled frequently together throughout India, advocating for nonviolent resistance to British rule and, through their own example, Hindu-Muslim solidarity. Khan’s results impressed an incredulous Gandhi. Commenting on Khan’s extraordinary ability to change the minds of the proud Pashtun people in this region, Gandhi said:

“That such men who would have killed a human being with no more thought than they would kill a sheep or a hen should at the bidding of one man have laid down their arms and accept nonviolence as the superior weapon sounds like a fairy tale.”

Abdul Ghaffar Khan (white) with members of his nonviolent army

In the 1930s and early 40s, the British met the Pashtun efforts for independence with massacres, torture, and destruction. Khan, for his part, was imprisoned for fifteen of these years, frequently condemned to solitary confinement, but the Khudai Khitmatgar, in the face of such bitter repression, never wavered from their commitment to nonviolence. Their persistence was met with success. In 1947, India finally won its long battle for independence and self-rule.

For Khan, the victory was bittersweet. The vision of Hindu-Muslim unity he shared with Gandhi would not be realized. In 1947, India split into the mostly Hindu Republic of India and mostly Muslim Dominion of Pakistan. Within four months of India’s independence, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist, who held Gandhi guilty of favoring the Muslims. Meanwhile, Ghaffar Khan, for his efforts of unity, was targeted by some Pakistanis as being anti-Muslim. He was attacked and hospitalized. In the coming decades, his opposition to Pakistan’s nascent political power landed him repeatedly in house arrest and jail. He was also exiled for seven years.

Despite many brushes with death due to assassination attempts and failing health brought on by over three decades of imprisonment, Ghaffar Khan known affectionately as Badshah, or king, remained committed to non-violence through it all. He died at the age of ninety-eight on January 20, 1988 in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Abdul Ghaffar Khan at one of his many appearances with Mohandas Gandhi