1925 -
Afghan resistance leader; Sufi pir; Afghan president, 1992 - 1993.
Born in Kabul in 1927 to a family of hereditary leaders of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, Sebghatullah Mojaddedi was educated at al-Azhar University in Cairo and at Kabul University. He fled Kabul in the 1970s and headed the Islamic center in Denmark from 1974 to 1978. After the Saur Revolution (1978), he went to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he formed the National Liberation Front of Afghanistan (Jebhe-ye Nejat-e Milli) and began an armed insurgency in Afghanistan against the Marxist government. He was elected president of the Afghan Interim Government, a government in exile, in Pakistan in 1989, and after the Najibullah government fell in 1992, he returned to Kabul. When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, Mojaddedi returned to exile in Pakistan, although he continued to visit Kabul, where he maintained a home. With the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, Mojaddedi returned to Kabul to participate in the new government of Hamid Karzai, although he holds no official positions.
Bibliography
Roy, Olivier. Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan. New York and Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Rubin, Barnett R. The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System, 2d edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
— GRANT FARR
