ome books ask what history did; others ask what history did to the human mind. Dr Khalid Sohail’s Prophets of Violence, Prophets of Peace: Understanding the Roots of Contemporary Political Violence belongs to the latter category.

The book brings together essays on an extraordinary range of modern figures: Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Kemal Atatürk, Martin Luther King Jr, Frantz Fanon and Leo Tolstoy. Revolutionaries sit beside pacifists, nationalists beside internationalists, poets beside politicians. What holds this diverse company together is Sohail’s attempt to understand not merely their politics, but the human psychology underlying their responses to injustice, oppression and power.

That is also where the author’s professional background becomes crucial. A Canada-based psychotherapist of Pakistani origin, Sohail approaches political history through the lens of human needs, wounds, fears, convictions and aspirations. His central questions are deceptively simple: why does one person confronted with injustice choose armed struggle while another chooses non-violence? Why does humiliation produce revolutionary rage in one individual and moral resistance in another? Can violence used in the name of liberation ultimately reproduce the domination it seeks to overthrow?

These questions give the book its contemporary relevance.

Nelson Mandela provides perhaps the most compelling starting point because his life defies easy categorisation. Remembered principally as an icon of reconciliation, Mandela nevertheless passed through a phase in which armed resistance appeared necessary after peaceful opposition to apartheid was brutally suppressed. Sohail presents him neither as a simple pacifist nor as a romantic revolutionary, but as a political personality shaped by changing circumstances. Mandela demonstrates that engagement with violence need not become a permanent moral identity.

Che Guevara represents a more uncompromising revolutionary temperament. Behind the familiar image on posters and T-shirts was a physician who came to regard revolutionary violence as historically necessary. Sohail’s psychological perspective makes Guevara interesting not simply as a Marxist or guerrilla, but as a personality driven by idealism, sacrifice, anger at injustice and an almost ascetic commitment to transformation. The moral intensity that makes Che attractive to generations of admirers also raises questions about the dangers of revolutionary absolutism.

Ho Chi Minh represents another form of revolutionary politics, rooted in anti-colonial and national struggle. His inclusion allows Sohail to place violence in the context of foreign domination and the closure of peaceful political avenues. The question, however, remains unresolved: even when violence is undertaken for liberation, what human costs does it impose?

Against these revolutionary figures stand the advocates of non-violence.

Gandhi is perhaps the most obvious. Sohail’s treatment gains value by refusing to turn him into an untouchable saint. Gandhi’s non-violence was not passivity; it was a disciplined method of confronting oppressive power without adopting its methods. His disagreements and contradictions make him more, rather than less, interesting.

Martin Luther King Jr translated a comparable moral philosophy into the American struggle against racial segregation. King understood non-violence as a political force. Its objective was not simply to defeat an adversary but also to transform the moral environment that sustained injustice. The psychological strength of such resistance lay partly in refusing to dehumanise the oppressor.

The Dalai Lama extends this argument into the spiritual realm. Confronted with displacement and political conflict, he has emphasised compassion, dialogue and patience. In Sohail’s gallery, he represents the possibility that political resistance need not surrender the inner life to hatred.

Leo Tolstoy offers the philosophical foundation for much of this tradition. His later moral writings criticised coercion, organised violence and institutional power and profoundly influenced Gandhi. His inclusion reminds us that political ideas can be transformed not only by statesmen and revolutionaries, but also by writers and moral thinkers.

Rabindranath Tagore introduces another dimension. His criticism of narrow nationalism and emphasis on universal humanism provide an important counterpoint to political movements that turn identity into an absolute. His disagreements with Gandhi demonstrate that two people committed to human dignity can nevertheless differ profoundly over nationalism, modernity and freedom.

The essays on Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah bring the discussion into the political and intellectual history of South Asia. Iqbal’s ideas about selfhood, spiritual awakening and human potential acquire particular significance when viewed psychologically. A people deprived of political confidence, his thought suggests, must recover an inner sense of dignity and agency.

Jinnah represents a different political personality: disciplined, constitutional and deeply invested in legal and political negotiation. His example reminds us that political transformation can occur through institutions and constitutional struggle rather than revolutionary insurrection.

Kemal Atatürk introduces yet another model: the revolutionary use of state power to remake society. His modernising and secularising reforms raise an enduring question: can liberation and modernisation imposed from above become coercive in their own right?

Frantz Fanon has a special resonance for Sohail. Fanon was a psychiatrist; Sohail is a psychotherapist. Their historical circumstances and political positions are very different, but both were interested in the intersection of psychological suffering and political structures.

Fanon’s great insight was that colonialism does not merely occupy territory. It penetrates language, identity and self-perception. Political domination can become psychological domination. The colonised individual may carry the wounds of oppression within himself.

This professional parallel makes Fanon particularly significant in reading Sohail. His own psychotherapeutic perspective similarly encourages him to look beneath political behaviour for accumulated humiliation, exclusion, rage, helplessness and wounded identity. Violence, in this reading, is not simply a political tactic; it can also be a psychological response to prolonged oppression.

Yet Sohail does not simply reproduce Fanon’s position. Fanon’s analysis could lead towards a defence of revolutionary violence under colonial conditions. Sohail’s broader gallery keeps the argument open. Gandhi stands beside Fanon; King offers an alternative to Che; Mandela complicates the distinction between violence and peace; Tolstoy challenges the assumption that coercion can produce genuine moral freedom. This dialogic quality is the book’s greatest strength.

Its limitation is that readers looking for exhaustive archival research or a systematic academic theory of political violence may find the essays more interpretive than definitive. Sohail writes primarily as a psychotherapist and humanist, rather than as a specialist historian of every movement and personality he examines. The book’s value, therefore, lies less in settling historical debates than in asking new psychological and moral questions about them.

Within Pakistani and Pakistani-Canadian intellectual writing, Sohail occupies a distinctive position. His Canadian location gives him the distance of migration without severing his engagement with the political and intellectual concerns of South Asia. His perspective is consequently both local and transnational. Jinnah appears beside Mandela, Iqbal beside Tolstoy, Gandhi beside Fanon and Atatürk beside King.

For Pakistani readers, this comparative method is especially valuable. Historical personalities are often transformed into icons or villains, leaving little room for complexity. Sohail’s psychotherapeutic instinct does the opposite: he asks us to look behind the monument and recover the complicated human being.

That may be the book’s most enduring contribution.

Prophets of Violence, Prophets of Peace does not resolve the argument between the revolutionary and the pacifist. Instead, it reminds us that human beings contain capacities for both violence and compassion and that circumstances, ideology, humiliation, hope and moral imagination influence the path they choose.

Sohail’s achievement is to make a familiar political debate human again. At a time when political opponents are too easily reduced to enemies, his book invites us to understand before we condemn and perhaps to recognise that the road from violence to peace begins with understanding the wounded human being behind the political act.

Prophets of Violence, Prophets of Peace

Understanding the Roots of Contemporary Political

Violence

Author: Dr Khalid Sohail

Publisher: Aks Publications, 2025

Pages: 388

Price: Rs 2,000

The reviewer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.