Usama bin Ladin’s “Father Sheikh”:

founding member of the Hizb al‐Tawabin, 82 and he was involved in the publication of
Gahiz from the very beginning. 83 Although the Hizb al‐Tawabin never became a well‐
known political party, it evidently played an important role in connecting some of the
most important mujahidin leaders to one another. In 1984, when Burhanuddin Rabbani
wished to conduct some important political business with Qazi Hussain Ahmad, 84 he
brought Yunus Khalis to the meeting with him on the basis of Khalis’s old connection to
Hussain Ahmad through the long‐defunct Hizb al‐Tawabin. 85
The level of involvement in the Hizb al‐Tawabin’s Gahiz journal by the men who would
eventually become leaders of the various mujahidin political parties is striking:
Minhajuddin Gahiz apparently turned to Sibghatullah Mujaddidi for the financial
support needed to get his publication off the ground, and Burhanuddin Rabbani
supported Gahiz from the beginning. 86 Hekmatyar himself admitted to submitting
several articles for publication in Gahiz under various pseudonyms even though he
claimed that the journal was not very popular among young people. 87 It is not yet
known whether the three other future Sunni mujahidin party leaders (Sayyid Ahmed
Gailani, Sayyaf and Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi) had any involvement in Gahiz.
Even so, it is remarkable that four of the seven eventual party leaders contributed
articles or funds to an Islamic magazine at a time when the splits between the various
factions were making it increasingly difficult for some of them to even sit together in
the same room.
Yunus Khalis was busy with a variety of projects during the time in which he
collaborated with Minhajuddin on the Gahiz publication. In the space of two years he
81 Ahmadzai gives the dates of Khalis’s first and last articles in Gahiz as 1968 and 1972. We will take those
as a baseline for the print‐run of Gahiz until the actual magazine can be found. See Ahmadzai, 88.
82 This is described as an organization “against obscenity” in one source. See Marwat, Shah, et al., 226.
Other founding members included Gahiz himself, Mawlawi ‘Abd al‐Rab Ahedi Wardak, Ahmad Khan
Tarjiman, and Sayyid ‘Abd al‐Ahad ‘Asharti. ‘Abd al‐Ahad is described as “the highest ranking member
and a skilled writer.” See Ahmadzai, 25‐26.
83 See the first article that Khalis published in Gahiz in Khalis, 1‐3.
84 Qazi Hussain Ahmad is a prominent religious scholar and political figure in Pakistan. He was the amir
of the Pakistani Jami’at‐e Islami political party from 1987 to 2008.
85 This anecdote reveals something about Ahmadzai’s otherwise unknown role during the jihad. See
Ahmadzai, 115–116.
86 Marwat, Shah, et al., 5–6. Din Muhammad even casually refers to Gahiz as being under the leadership of
Sibghatullah Mujaddidi. See Muhammad (2007), 141.
87 Marwat, Shah, et al., 6.
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