How can you kill a man who believed in you? If you brandish a gun, he will smile kindly at your ignorance and try to reason with you. If you still don't listen, he will smile and ask you to kill him if that will make you happy. But he will refuse to give up his belief in your humanity.
Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi and King all personified the ideal of non-violence: only love can drive out hate. There are many others who have dared to face violence with love and hatred with understanding. They have achieved more success than bullets.
We have grown up thinking that violence is the only way to deal with violence. We watch violent tales at dinner. But we never hear of people who have faced violent situations with a remarkable courage and an almost irrational faith. They succeeded in not only saving themselves from harm, but also in reforming the aggressors' attitude towards violence.
For instance, the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in New York, in which John G. Whittier and WIlliam Lloyd Garrison were present, was broken up by rowdies. Some of the speakers, as they left the hall, were roughly handled by the crowd. Perceiving this, Lucretia Mott asked the gentleman who was escorting her, to leave her and help some of the other ladies who were timid. "But who will take care of you?" he asked. "This man," she answered, quietly laying her hand on the arm of one of the roughest of the mob. "He will see me safe through." Though taken aback for the moment by such unexpected confidence, the man responded by conducting her respectfully through the tumult to a place of safety. The next day she went into a restaurant near the place of meeting, and, recognizing the leader of the mob at one of the tables, sat down by him, and entered into conversation with him. When he left the room, he asked a gentleman at the door who that lady was, and on hearing her name, remarked, "Well, she's a good, sensible woman."
When I first began reading about non-violent ways of living, I had a reaction much like anyone else. The Indians had no other choice but non-violence in their struggle for independence from the British, I thought. Can someone really turn from a violent way of life to non-violence?
Then I read about Abdul Gaffar Khan, later known as Bacha, or Badshah, Khan -- the king of khans. Khan didn't have to struggle -- he was born into wealth and privilege. He was also born into the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan, then under British rule. For hundreds of years, his tribesmen had glorified violence and revenge as a means of justice. This drove Khan to seek an alternative that could express the true spirit of Islam. Inspired by Gandhi's ideals of non-violence, and finding concordant ideals of amal, yakeen and muhabbat (right conduct, faith and love) in Islam, Khan recruited 100,000 soldiers from his Pashtun tribesmen into a non-violent army. Although Khan and his followers endured a great deal of persecution under the oppressive British rule, they never gave up their oath of non-violence. And the British, who knew how to respond to violent revolts, didn't know how to face a "non-violent army," whose members were willing to suffer for what they believed in.
Every one of these people stressed that the means were as important as the ends, and I am beginning to realize now how utterly futile it is to respond to violence with violence. And as I think about it, I realize that this applies to all forms of violence: from the obvious ones that affect me indirectly (crime, war and terrorism), to the subtle ones that affect me directly: confrontational situations, anger, disrespect.
It is suspiciously easy to respond with violence, and hardto respond non-violently. But when non-violence works, it suceeds; when violence is used, you're never really sure if it's working, or if you're only breeding more of the same.
Arun Sripati is an organizer of this year's JHU Season for Non-Violence, which begins Jan. 30.
