Usama bin Ladin’s “Father Sheikh”:

thus mirror larger divisions within the mujahidin. Jam’iat‐e Islami became the only
Sunni mujahidin party to include a high proportion of non‐Pashtun members, while
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb‐e Islami was formed from the core membership of the
Muslim Youth. Hekmatyar’s following was generally younger, more politically radical
and more willing to take sometimes foolish risks in the early days of the mujahidin
movement. 70 It should be no surprise that Rabbani and Hekmatyar’s efforts to lay claim
to the legacy of Professor Niazi have produced a group of sources for Western scholars,
which emphasize Niazi’s importance to the development of the mujahidin movement in
Afghanistan.
Niazi has an important role to play in any history of the mujahidin, but his group at
Kabul University was not the only politically active Islamic organization in Afghanistan
in the late 1960s. The primary sources abound with stories of clandestine meetings of
activists where leaders such as Yunus Khalis, sometimes joined by the Sufi leader
Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, 71 would discuss Islam, socialism and politics with teachers,
professionals and young people. 72 Sibghatullah Mujaddidi would eventually go on to
create his own mujahidin political party by mobilizing his contacts in Afghan Sufi
networks. 73 Certainly, some of the gatherings attended by Khalis and Mujaddidi took
place at Kabul University, however these kinds of informal groups also met in Kunduz,
Nangarhar and many other locations. 74
Even while they were distinct from the Kabul Islamists to some extent, their purpose
appears to have been the same: to awaken the population to socialism’s threat to their
way of life, to give attendees useful rhetorical tools to help combat leftists in their
schools and towns and, as the movements developed, to help organize and connect the
70 This is especially apparent in Hekmatyar’s involvement in the disastrous 1975 attempt to stage a coup
d’état in Afghanistan.
71 Mujaddidi was already an internationally recognized leader of a Sufi order, and later became the leader
of the Jebha‐ye Nejat‐e Milli, one of the seven Sunni mujahidin political parties.
72 Muhammad (2007), 26.
73 For further discussion of Mujaddidi’s family and its influence on the early directions taken by the
Islamic resistance movements in Afghanistan, see Olivier Roy. Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan. 2nd.
Translated by Gwydir St. First Edition. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 47. Ibrahim
Mujaddidi was closely involved in the development of the Khuddam al‐Furqan organization as well. See
Ruttig (2010), 6; and Ruttig (2006), 8.
74 Muhammad (2007), 26–27. By the early 1970s it appears that Mujaddidi was no longer welcome at
meetings at which Hekmatyar and some of the other Islamists were holding court.
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