1940 -
President of Afghanistan, 1993 - 1996.
Burhanuddin Rabbani was the president of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996. He was born in Faizabad, Badakhshan province, to a Tajik family and educated in Islamic studies at Kabul University and alAzhar University in Cairo, where he received a master of arts degree (1968). He returned to Kabul to teach in the faculty of Islamic law at Kabul University (1970) and was a leader of the Islamist movement in Afghanistan. In 1971 he joined the Jamiʿat-e Islami and became its leader. In 1974 he fled Afghanistan, first traveling to Saudi Arabia and then to Pakistan, where he reorganized the Jamiʿat-e Islami as a guerrilla militia to fight against the Kabul government. As he was Tajik, Rabbani's political party drew most of its followers from the non-Pushtun Afghans, especially in the northern and western regions of Afghanistan.
With the collapse of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government in 1992, Rabbani returned to Kabul and became president of Afghanistan. Driven from Kabul by the Taliban in 1996, Rabbani sought refuge in northern Afghanistan, where he formed the United National and Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (UNIFSA), also known as the Northern Alliance, to fight against the Taliban government. When the Taliban fell in late November 2001, UNIFSA forces captured Kabul. Although Rabbani was still seen as the president of Afghanistan by some of his followers, he was forced to relinquish control to the new government of Hamid Karzai.
Bibliography
Roy, Olivier. Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Rubin, Barnett. The Fragmentation of Afghanistan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
— GRANT FARR
