WHO WAS BADSHAH KHAN?

The article preceding mine in this installment of "Peace by Other Means" concludes with a hopeful reference to Pakistan and to the possibility of reconciliation, by means of culture, between Pakistan and India. "Peace by Means of Culture," the introduction to this symposium installment, is skeptical about the possibility of any such thing, though it grants that peaceful "commerce" between cultures is salutary when it does occur. My contribution here will be to show how even a culture that is set on revenge can take up practices that are directly in the service of peace. My interest, in particular, will be in the relationship of Mohandas Gandhi, the father of modern India, and Badshah Khan, a Pashtun revolutionary in what would become the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (see fig. 1). I In July of 2013, Malala Yousafzai, the courageous teenager who was shot by the Taliban for promoting girls' education in Pakistan, gave an inspiring speech to the United Nations General Assembly (now on YouTube and highly recommended). In the course of her speech, she referred to Badshah Khan as a great inspiration for her own commitment to nonviolence. Who was he? Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, later known as Badshah or "King," was born in 1890 in the town of Utmanzai, not far from Peshawar in what was then the Northwest Frontier Province of India. 22:2 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-3464804 © 2016 by Duke University Press Figure 1. Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (at the microphone) during prayer in the early 1940s. His father was a khan, a village headman, widely respected for his honesty and, more grudgingly perhaps, for his somewhat independent approach to the Islam taught by the mullahs of his day and for his coolness toward the code of badal (revenge) that was a prominent cultural feature among the Pashtuns (sometimes spelled and pronounced Pathans). Ghaffar Khan's early years ran a course roughly parallel to Gandhi's. Each was...