Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

He was born at Utmanzai in Hashtnagar into a prosperous Muhammadzai Pashtun landowning family — described by the English article as a Sunni Muslim family ¹ — the son of Abdul Bahram Khan ¹. At the mission-run Edward's School his teacher Reverend Wigram impressed on him the role of education in serving the community; he declined a commission in the Guides because Indian officers remained second-class citizens, and studied at Aligarh Muslim University ¹. He married Meharqanda in 1912 — their sons were the poet Abdul Ghani Khan and the politician Abdul Wali Khan — and after her death in the 1918 influenza epidemic he remarried, to her cousin Nambata, who died in Jerusalem in 1926 ¹.

In 1929 he founded the Khudai Khidmatgar, "Servants of God", an anti-colonial nonviolent resistance movement whose members — the Red Shirts — took an oath of nonviolence ¹. When he was arrested on 23 April 1930 during the Salt Satyagraha protests, troops fired on the unarmed Khudai Khidmatgar crowd in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani Bazaar, killing an estimated 200–250, while the members kept their nonviolent discipline under fire ¹. He recognised his struggle as a jihad in which only the enemy held swords, and he never lost faith in the compatibility of Islam and non-violence ¹. The Urdu biography also records his work, through the Anjuman-e Islah, against un-Islamic customs among Muslims ².

He strongly opposed the partition of India, sided with the Congress and the All-India Azad Muslim Conference against the Muslim League, and told the Congress leaders, when they accepted the plan without consulting the Khudai Khidmatgars, "you have thrown us to the wolves" ¹. In June 1947 the Bannu Resolution of the Frontier leadership demanded a Pashtun choice of an independent Pashtunistan; Britain refused, and he and his elder brother Abdul Jabbar Khan boycotted the referendum ¹. In the new Pakistan he was repeatedly imprisoned and kept under house arrest — during the Waziristan rebellion years, and again after condemning the Babrra massacre of his supporters — and over his lifetime he spent decades in prison or exile ¹. India gave him the Bharat Ratna in 1987, and his autobiography appeared in Pashto ¹.

The English article attests the man himself as a devout Muslim whose nonviolence was grounded in Islam ¹; the word Sunni appears in it only in the description of the family he was born into ¹. The Arabic article's infobox gives his religion as Islam ³, the Urdu article names no school ², and Wikidata records Islam only ⁴. Because family background is not the man's own attestation, the museum's data record leaves his school unknown, flagged for the founder, with the readings preserved exactly.

He died under house arrest at Peshawar on 20 January 1988 and, following his will, was buried at his house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan; both sides in the Afghan war declared a ceasefire for the funeral, which the Afghan president attended ¹.

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