Burhanuddin Rabbani

Biography

Burhanuddin Rabbani was born in 1940 in Badakhshan in northeastern Afghanistan, an ethnic Tajik. After religious schooling in Kabul he studied Islamic law and theology at Kabul University, graduating in 1963, and was hired there as a lecturer. He took a master's degree in Islamic philosophy at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he came into contact with the Muslim Brotherhood, later completed a doctorate there, and was among the first to translate Sayyid Qutb into Persian.

Back in Kabul he organized Islamist students, and in 1972 a council chose him to lead Jamiat-e Islami, a party drawn mainly from Tajiks whose early recruits included Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Facing arrest in 1974, he fled to Pakistan, and after the Soviet intervention of 1979 Jamiat became one of the main mujahideen parties fighting the communist government.

When that government fell in 1992, Rabbani became president under the Peshawar Accord, but his government was consumed by fighting among the mujahideen factions. The Taliban drove him from Kabul in 1996; his government in exile kept international recognition while the Northern Alliance fought on. He returned to Kabul in November 2001 and handed power to Hamid Karzai's interim administration in December.

He later led the opposition United National Front and from 2010 chaired the High Peace Council charged with talks with the Taliban. On 20 September 2011 a suicide bomber posing as a Taliban envoy killed him at his home in Kabul.