Since the 2005 London bombings, I've spoken with a number of Muslim men who knew the ringleader, Mohammad Sidique Khan. Independently of each other, they've emphasized to me that Mr. Khan left his family's moderate mosque for a Saudi-financed surrogate down the road. There, he could examine theology and upend mainstream imams whose feudal traditions ooze the warning: Do as you're told. It must have been galling for him to experience such condescension at his family's mosque.
Being treated like an infant didn't quite square with the fact that Mr. Khan and his mates had already taken the initiative to combat drug addiction and crime in their neighbourhood. They baptized themselves the Mullah Boys. These mullahs detested their parents' out-of-touch clerics, whose tribal bent shunned Mr. Khan's brain and almost shattered his heart.
He passionately wanted to marry an Indian Muslim from outside his clannish Pakistani community, only to be forbidden by his parents. Islamists - Muslims who treat Islam as a political ideology - grabbed hold of Mr. Khan's grief.
They assured him that his family deformed Islam by preventing his nuptials merely because the bride-to-be was culturally unsavoury. On this one, the Islamists spoke truth. Luring the lovesick Mr. Khan to their mosque, they plied him with more reasons to feel humiliated: Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine, Kashmir.
Shiv Malik, an investigative journalist, dissected Mr. Khan's radicalization. Mr. Malik concluded that Mr. Khan may have felt indignant about Western foreign policy, but that wasn't the reason he led a cell of young men to kill themselves and 52 London commuters. At the heart of this tragedy is a conflict between the first and subsequent generations of British Pakistanis - with many young people using Islamism as a kind of liberation theology to assert their right to choose how to live.
Before hooking up with Islamists, suppose Mohammad Sidique Khan had met Abdul Ghaffar Khan. "Abdul who?" you might ask. Abdul. Ghaffar. Khan. He's sometimes known as Badshah - "the King" - except that he donned no regalia. He built an army of God that performed community service and fought imperialism with the arsenal of non-violence.
This tall, strapping and faithful Muslim man deserves to be heralded in his own right, but for our purposes, he is the answer to the question, "Where is Islam's Gandhi?"
Ghaffar Khan was a 20th-century Muslim reformer. The son of a middling landowner, he lived in the region known today as Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, an area now teeming with the Taliban.
In the years leading up to India's independence in 1947, thousands of his people, the Pathans, reinterpreted honour and Islam. They showed that freedom comes from disciplining the self, not conquering the Other.
"One of his first concerns was the role of women," observes the biographer and peace educator Eknath Easwaran. He "encouraged them to come out from behind the veil, as the women in his own family had done."
Ghaffar Khan's sister often toured the Frontier with him, addressing crowds herself as well as listening to the fiery orations of her brother. He knew his Koran, choosing to publicize those rarely recited passages that give women and men equal responsibilities. He established a school for girls and published a journal, Pushtun, that questioned honour-drenched practices.
When the Indian freedom struggle picked up speed, Ghaffar Khan's alliance with Gandhi dovetailed with his countercultural Islam to ensure that Muslim women would be central players.
He also recruited about 100,000 men to become the "Khudai Khidmatgars," or Servants of God: uniformed soldiers who would replace blood feuds with peaceful means to advance home rule for India. The Servants of God promoted Muslim-Hindu unity with moral courage.
Gandhi came to view them as such dedicated exemplars of his non-violent vision that he prayed that the "Frontier Pathans may not make only India free, but teach the world."
All this, despite being vilified by fellow Muslims who pressed for a separate homeland - Pakistan - and despite being brutalized by the British, who perceived the Pathans as incapable of rising above their vendettas with each other.
However mercenary the British could be, Ghaffar Khan charged, Pathan culture displayed worse "defects." He singled out the code of honour for pitting family against family, clan against clan, sowing fear in every generation for past humiliations yet to be avenged.
Even before he knew of Gandhi, the young Pathan knew his personal task: "to educate, to enlighten, to lift up, to inspire." Only later did the gust of Gandhi become wind behind Ghaffar Khan's back. With the Mahatma's ideas animating India and vindicating his own, he sensed that the hour for collective introspection had arrived.
And it all made exquisite sense until Ghaffar Khan and Gandhi witnessed their dreams of Muslim-Hindu unity unravel. Pakistan, a state for Muslims, would be carved out of India, a Hindu-majority country. The August, 1947, partition presaged yet more communal slaughter - and the worst news of all: in January, 1948, Gandhi was killed by a Hindu nationalist who accused him of being too pro-Muslim.
In turn, Ghaffar Khan incurred Muslim wrath for being too pro-Hindu. Pakistan banned the Servants of God, arrested him for sedition and incarcerated him. Over the next four decades, his life amounted to a series of penal sentences. At the age of 95, he protested against martial law in Pakistan, only to be rearrested. He died in January, 1988, in Peshawar, but not before announcing one last fast to stop Muslim-Hindu violence.
For me, Ghaffar Khan's aborted legacy is something of a gauntlet. More of us will have to pick it up - and we can do that by becoming part of his proverbial village. His life attests to the fact that behind every agent of moral courage is another whom we don't know about yet. Gandhi's ability to defend Muslim-Hindu harmony would have been bolstered by his tight bond with Ghaffar Khan, who helped feed the Mahatma's moral courage.
Likewise, Ghaffar Khan's moral courage took nourishment from a nucleus of other individuals. There were his siblings. There were the Hindu, Christian and Muslim leaders of Indian independence who, jailed with him, interpreted each other's holy texts for an evolving, pluralistic nation.
Above all, there was his father, Behram Khan, who sent his sons away for a British-run education in Peshawar despite the mullahs' mantra that "those who learn in schools are none but money's tools. In heaven they will never dwell; they will surely go to hell."
It's not as if Behram Khan invited them to go to hell. Instead, writes Easwaran, he "was known throughout the district for a most un-Pathan-like quality: forgiveness." Over and over, he "chose to forgive rather than seek revenge - a decision that must have deeply influenced the character and career of his youngest son."
These connections suggest that moral courage doesn't have to be the herculean act of one person toiling in isolation. Counterintuitive as it sounds, individuality takes a village. For the individual to leave a legacy that a new generation can build on, a network of people needs to get involved.
We come full circle to the ringleader of the London bombings. What if someone had told an increasingly agitated Mohammad Sidique Khan about Abdul Ghaffar Khan? That Ghaffar Khan had battled British policy, but did so by mobilizing the best in his fellow Muslims? That he would have even welcomed Mohammad Sidique Khan's intercultural marriage?
Would this story have persuaded the British lad to rebuff the Islamists?
We can only know that it would have been worth the try.
Excerpted from Allah, Liberty & Love, by Irshad Manji, with permission from Random House Canada.
Irshad Manji is a Globe and Mail columnist and the director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University.