Introducing Khudai Khidmatgar

My name is Peter. I am a servant of God. I choose to serve Him...no man or woman has forced this upon me. I have not been brainwashed, neither have I lost my faculties from any cause. I am not a terrorist.

I believe in one God, and I believe that God spoke to Moses and that His Word is recorded in the Torah...that God spoke to Jesus and that His Word is recorded in the Gospels...that God spoke to Muhammad and that His Word is recorded in the Qur'an.

The teaching of the Qur'an is how to establish peace (salaam) between human beings. Many Muslims have come to the recognition that peace can only be established through peaceful means. These have included the twelve Imams revered by Ithna 'Ashari Shi'i Muslims, Jalalu'd-Din Rumi and many other Sufi saints and their followers, and, in our own time, 'Abdu'l-Ghaffar Khan (called Badshah Khan) and the Khudai Khidmatgar.

I discovered Badshah Khan in 2006, when I was reading Leo Tolstoi's "The Kingdom of God is within you" for the first time, and, propelled by my veneration for the prophet Muhammad, had sought traces of non-violent ideology and activism amongst Muslims. I read two biographies of Badshah Khan, the one by Eknath Easwaran and the other by Rajmohan Gandhi.

With war raging in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the Pashtun people fighting for their religious, cultural and national independence, the message of Badshah Khan is as relevant today as it was in the 1920s when he founded Khudai Khidmatgar. But his living non-violence as a Muslim does not speak to the travails of his own people...it speaks to all Muslims as well. It speaks to the adherents of Hamas and Hizbollah, and bids them lay down their weapons and abdure their genocidal ideology. It speaks to the rival factions in Iraq, and reminds them that Islam is the religion of peace, not the religion of war. It speaks to the people and government of Iran, and calls for them to abandon the oppression of the religious minorities living in their midst, and to work with all those whose aim is to bring peace and prosperity to their region.

And this same message, as articulated by Mohandas K. Gandhi, by Nelson Mandela, by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and by the millions of unsung heros and heroines who have taken up the cause of non-violence, this message speaks to all of humanity.

Here I stand, a servant of God, khudai khidmatgar.