Bacha Khan, Islam and Nationalism: Mobilizing Islam for a progressive social transformation.

Religion becomes part of the socio-cultural fabric and the political programs in a society where the terms of debate and engagement are defined by religion, political programs can contain an appeal to the religious sentiments or they can be articulated in the terminology and inspirations drawn from religion. Religion being absorbed into the socio-cultural milieu becomes a passive but potent force. For most part religion can be assumed to be a background gatekeepr, explosive but in the background nonetheless. But at certain times religion and particularly the political manifestations of religion can channel the whole debates, imagination and thinking about particular events, issues or programs.

                                        

Appeal to religious sentiment is not always for the worst. So is the use of the religious terminology, inspirations and ideological drives. Given the level of how much religion has been embodied into the socio-cultural setting, the invocation of religion, per se, in itself, is normatively neutral. A transformative politics, a progressive social program and an agenda for changing cultural attitudes if framed under the terminology and under appeal to religious ideals can achieve socio-political progress by keeping a harmony between the progress imagined and the social order in place. This exactly was how Abdul Ghaffar Khan a.k.a. Bacha Khan invoked Islam and teachings of Islam for a larger socio-political transformation of the Pashtun masses.

Bacha Khan was a social reformer and a politician active in the then NWFP under the British Raj and then subsequently under Pakistan. He was an ally of the All India Congress and in the official historiography is much maligned for his pre-partition politics. But Bacha Khan was much more than a politician. His movement was called Khudai Khidmatgar Tehreek (Movement for the service of God). The use of this name today will cause an alarm as to the objectives of the movement as it may sound a neo-Jihadist or an Islamist front. But the terms were Islamic, the framework was meant to be harmonious with the religious fascination the masses usually have (in even today's socio-political setting). The movement was defined as, "Khuday ta da khidmat hajat nishta. Da hagha da makhluq khidmat kawal da haga khidmat dy," meaning that, "God is in no need of being served. Serving his creature is a service to him." Famously he also said about the organizational structure and the spirit of the movement, "Da khuday pa khidmat ke ikhtilaf nistha. Ikhtilaf da khudgharzai na paida kegy," meaning that, "there is no difference to be had in service to God. Differences are born out of self-interest." Read these in terms of the concepts of Wahdat-ul-Wajood (unity of all existence), the most popular Sufi mystic tradition of the subcontinent. Bacha Khan was a close follower of the 17th century Bayazid Ansari, popularly known as Peer-e-Rokhan, who had his own school of Sufi Islam and fought the Mughal for autonomy of the Pashtun lands.

The Khudai Khidmatgar Tehreek was preceded by Tehreek-e-Islah e Afaghna (Movement for reform of Afghans). That movement was limited in scale but defined the direction that Khudai Khidmatgars will take. After seeing the wastage of resources at weddings and the extra spending on lavish invitations, Bacha Khan would travel to each village and would lecture people on the virtues of simplicity. He also urged people to channel the resources to economic activities rather than wasting on a day or two celebrations. Later, the Khudai Khidmatgar Tehreek would make people swear a pledge that they will spend at-least two hours doing some service free of cost, be that cleaning the streets, offering some help to the poor or giving a helping hand in the fields.

Other than invoking the behavior of prophet at Taif (where stones were pelted at him and he bleed) in support for the principle of non-violence, religious injunctions were also used for progressive social attitudes. Regarding the question of place of women in a society, Bacha Khan famously said, “If you want to see the level of progress of a society, see how it treats women.” The Azad Madrassas (schools) were open to both boys and girls in a deeply conservative setting. Because of these progressive, even by today’s standards, Bacha Khan faced consternation from the Mullahs but he answered with forbearance and countered their arguments from within the corpus of Islamic teachings.

The outlook, the program, the spirit and the matter of Bacha Khan’s movement was secular and progressive in nature but in order to make that palatable he didn’t use borrowed terms and concepts which would have sounded alien in the historical setting of his time. The kind of social progress imagined was also complemented by a practical and immediate political goal of freedom from the British imperialism. In that this was not a conservative movement for reform of the society in terms of harking on puritanism and revisionism. Instead the language of religion was employed to appeal for a progressive social transformation and a radical political demand of freedom.

Going to the first paragraph where religion was called to be a passive but potent identifier of politics and political thinking, it is pertinent to call that during that time the same kind of Islam was used for completely different purposes. All India Muslim League fell to Islam for Muslim exclusiveness and thus for creating a separate homeland for Muslims while Bacha Khan rallied masses for a secular future by using the same evocative grammar of religion.

Religion, being part of the socio-cultural reality, isn’t always reduced to the margins of the theological debates. In our times, when there is a fervent debate about one kind of Islam and the use of blasphemy as a tool to silence critics and weaponizing the public sentiments to suppress dissent and dissuade alternative viewpoint, it is important to truly detect the direction religious discourse is taking. In this time it may not be possible to use the ideals and semantics of religion for a secular and progressive future because the mood of the mainstream politics has co-opted a fundamentalist variety of religion for vested interests. But it is possible to open alternative avenues of debate and thus alternative imaginings of a future based on an egalitarian and tolerant interpretations of Islam as Bacha Khan once did for transforming the society of his times.