Gandhi’s message has relevance today

By AMITABH PAL

It’s Mahatma Gandhi’s 140th birthday today, and his spirit of nonviolence lives on around the world, including in Muslim societies.

Earlier this year, defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi invoked Gandhi’s name in urging his followers to fight on. He asked his supporters to “adopt the tactics of Gandhi, the tactics of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.”

Iran is hardly the first Muslim country where Gandhian protests have flowered.

Muslim nonviolence inspired by Gandhi surfaced with Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a friend of the Mahatma. In the 1930s and 1940s, he led a nonviolent peace force of more than 100,000 Pashtuns for social reform and against British rule in a region synonymous today with violence: the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Khan (popularly known as the Frontier Gandhi) spent almost 30 years in prison — evenly divided between the British and the Pakistani governments — for his efforts to get self-rule for the Pashtuns. (There were a number of other Muslims who played prominent roles alongside Gandhi in the campaign for India’s independence.)

The 1979 Iranian Revolution was essentially a broad-based nonviolent rebellion against the Shah (the clerics hijacked the movement afterward), with nearly all the violence being inflicted on the protesters by the monarch’s security forces.

Ibrahim Rugova (dubbed the “Gandhi of the Balkans”) led a remarkable project of peaceful noncooperation by the Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s, where for a decade they set up a massive parallel social system, including schools and hospitals, in response to Serbian repression.

The first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was a largely nonviolent movement. And despite a distressing reliance on violence in the Second Intifada that started earlier this decade, Palestinians even here have practiced nonviolent civil disobedience. A series of peaceful protests against the Israeli separation wall in the village of Bili’n, for instance, got the Israeli Supreme Court to change the wall’s course.

In Pakistan in recent years, a mass street movement clamored for the restoration of an independent judiciary. It played a key role in the toppling of dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007-08. When the democratic government of President Asif Ali Zardari dithered on reinstating the judges, the lawyers again came out in force early this year and forced Zardari to finally allow them to reassume their place on the bench. The lawyers had to face tremendous repression at the hands of Musharraf, including government-approved attacks on a lawyers’ gathering in Karachi in May 2007 that left about 40 people dead.

Maldives

Late last year, in a little-known instance, the people of the small Indian Ocean island nation of Maldives brought down a tyrant, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, after 30 years of his autocratic rule. Mass peaceful mobilization by the opposition candidate, Mohamed Nasheed, helped ensure that Gayoom finally conceded when he lost the presidential election to Nasheed in October. Gayoom was no slouch in the repression department. Demonstrators were badly beaten by the police, and critics were sentenced to long years in prison. Nasheed himself was brutally tortured before being forced into exile.

The fact that Muslims are engaging again and again in the practice of nonviolence to counter tyranny and injustice gives the lie to the notion that Islam is an intrinsically violent religion. Gandhi understood this in his day as he tried to reconcile Hindus and Muslims. We should understand it in our day — thereby honoring his memory.

X Amitabh Pal, co-editor of the Progressive Media Project and managing editor of The Progressive magazine in Madison, Wis., is writing a book on nonviolent activism in Muslim societies. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune..