Khan's Triumph of Will

SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION

Guided by the Prophet's teachings and the affirmations of Allah on his lips, Badshah Khan's reform goals took stronger and bigger shape. He realized that education was the only way to uplift the downtrodden Pushtuns. Barely 20 years old, Khan followed his intuition and opened a school for the Pushtun children. As his reform instincts kept growing, Khan increasingly wondered about the source of his desire to reform; Who was he - a twenty-year-old Mohammedzai farm boy, not even matriculated from high school - to uplift an ancient, noble people? Finding no answers from the outside, he sought answers from within. For several days and nights, Khan performed a "chilla", a fast, and prayed in a small mosque. Easwaran captures the essence of the transformed Khan at the end of the fast as follows:

"It was early morning when Ghaffar Khan ended his fast...and walked out with a vague but powerful awareness that he was not the same man who had entered the mosque a few days before. He had not received the direct answers...but he felt a strength he had not known before. And he understood, dimly, that it was the strength of God. Islam! Submit! Surrender to the Lord and know His strength! Ghaffar felt swelling within him the desire to serve this great God. And since He needed no service, Ghaffar would serve His creatures instead - the tattered villagers who were too ignorant and too steeped in violence to help themselves."

Easwaran compares Khan's transformation to St. Francis of Assisi's who had a similar spiritual experience 700 years ago. Just as St. Francis heard a clear voice commanding him to revitalize the Christian institutions, this Islamic prophet derived from within a singleness of purpose to tirelessly serve his community.

Mahadev Desai, who wrote a biography Two Servants of God" on Badshah Khan and his brother Dr. Khan" described Khan's spiritual temperament:

"The greatest thing in him is...his spirituality - better still, the true spirit of Islam - submission to God. He has measured Gandhiji's life all through with this yardstick...It is not Gandhi's name or fame that have attracted (Khan) to Gandhi, not his political work, nor his spirit of rebellion and revolution. It is (Gandhi's) pure and ascetic life and his insistence on self-purification that have had the greatest appeal for him, and (Khan's) whole life since 1919 onwards has been one sustained effort for self-purification."

Badshah Khan, in his own words, describes his self-transformation:

"As a young boy, I had had violent tendencies; the hot blood of the Pathans was in my veins. But in jail I had nothing to do except read the Koran. I read about the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca, about his patience, his suffering, his dedication. I had read it all before, as a child, but now I read it in the light of what I was hearing all around me about Gandhi's struggle against the British...They changed my life forever."

With the gift of "Iman" (a complete and unshakable faith of a pure heart directed toward Allah) and an awakened "Nur" (the plentitude of light of God) Khan was now ready to help the Pushtuns and rise up to the Koran's calling in Surah II: 129:

Our Lord! And raise up in them an Apostle from among them who shall recite to them Thy communications and teach them the Book and the wisdom, and purify them; surely Thou are the Mighty, the wise.

The Buddha's message on self-transformation was "One who conquers himself is greater than another who conquers 1,000 times 1,000 men." Khan's transformational legacy is a marvelous feat of a man of God who conquered himself and helped 100,000 men reform themselves.

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