Amitabh Pal says, in advance of the observance of Mahatma Gandhi’s 140th birthday on October 2nd, that the spirit of nonviolence lives on around the world, including in Muslim societies.
His essay appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
It’s Mahatma Gandhi’s 140th birthday on Oct. 2, and his spirit of nonviolence lives on around the world, including in Muslim societies.
Earlier this year, defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi invoked Gandhi’s name in urging his followers to fight on. He asked his supporters to “adopt the tactics of Gandhi, the tactics of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.”
Iran is hardly the first Muslim country where Gandhian protests have flowered.
Muslim nonviolence inspired by Gandhi surfaced with Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a friend of the Mahatma. In the 1930s and 1940s, he led a nonviolent peace force of more than 100,000 Pashtuns for social reform and against British rule in a region synonymous today with violence: the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Khan (popularly known as the Frontier Gandhi) spent almost 30 years in prison — evenly divided between the British and the Pakistani governments — for his efforts to get self-rule for the Pashtuns. (There were a number of other Muslims who played prominent roles alongside Gandhi in the campaign for India’s independence.)