Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Khuda-i Khidmatgar (KK), in the Pashto language “Servants of God,” was a unique formation as an unarmed resistance force with roots in an Islamic interpretation of non-violent politics. It pledged itself to non-violent resistance to British rule and to the reform of Pashtun, also known as Pathan society (the dominant ethnolinguistic group in eastern and southern Afghanistan and in the Northwest Frontier (NWF) Province of today's Pakistan). Launched in 1929 as the interventionist wing of a broader social reform and Pashtun youth movement, the KK was banned in 1948, following independence from British rule and the partition of the subcontinent. At different points in its brief 18-year history, the KK was partly the representative office of the NWF section of the Indian National Congress (Congress); at other moments it was a social welfare organization, as well as an unarmed, rurally based, anti-colonial protest force. At its peak in the 1930s, KK membership was estimated at 25,000, consisting mostly of men but also a few hundred women. Membership was open primarily to Pashtuns, but though most of the KK members and office holders were Muslims, there were also some Hindu and Sikh recruits. Despite being a voluntary civil movement with an explicitly pacifist and reformist agenda, the KK was often referred to as an army because of its organizational characteristics and institutional ... log in or subscribe to read full text