Burhanuddin Rabbani

Burhanuddin Rabbani (20 September 1940 – 20 September 2011) was an Afghan politician and professor of Islamic law who led Jamiat-e Islami from 1972 and served as president of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, remaining the internationally recognised president in exile until 2001 and holding the office again briefly that year. He later headed the Afghanistan National Front and the High Peace Council, and was assassinated at his Kabul home on his seventy-first birthday. ^{1 2}

Rabbani was born at Yaftal, in the Fayzabad district of Badakhshan, the son of Muhammed Yousuf, of a Tajik family. After schooling in his home province he studied at the Darul-uloom-e-Sharia (Abu Hanifa) school in Kabul, then read Islamic law and theology at Kabul University, graduating in 1963 and joining its faculty as a professor. At Al-Azhar in Cairo he took a master's degree in Islamic philosophy and a doctorate, with a thesis on the Sufi poet Abd al-Rahman Jami, and he was among the first Afghans to translate Sayyid Qutb into Persian. In 1972 he was chosen to head Jamiat-e Islami; when the police came to arrest him at the university in 1974, his students helped him escape. ^{1 2}

The party he formed at the university attracted then-students Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, who became the two leading mujahideen commanders of the Soviet–Afghan War; Rabbani's forces were the first mujahideen to enter Kabul in 1992. ¹

Rabbani became president of the Islamic State of Afghanistan in June 1992 as the communist regime fell, and his government held Kabul through the civil war until the Taliban took the city in September 1996. He then led the recognised government in exile and was political head of the Northern Alliance. When the Taliban fell in 2001 he returned and served as president again from 13 November to 22 December 2001, when the Bonn Conference chose Hamid Karzai as interim leader. ¹

Rabbani went on to lead the Afghanistan National Front, the largest opposition bloc to Karzai's government, and in 2010 became head of the High Peace Council, charged with negotiating with the Taliban. On 20 September 2011, his seventy-first birthday, a suicide bomber posing as a Taliban peace emissary killed him at his Kabul home with explosives hidden in his turban. He was buried in the Wazir Akbar Khan cemetery in Kabul, and Karzai gave him the title Martyr of Peace; his son Salahuddin Rabbani succeeded him at the High Peace Council. ^{1 2}

The Arabic article's infobox gives Rabbani's religion as Sunni Islam and his school of jurisprudence as Hanafi, and its text describes his tribe as Sunni Tajik by ethnicity. The English article names no school for him: it records his schooling at a school named for Abu Hanifa, his professorship of Islamic law and theology, his Azhar doctorate and his party leadership — formation, office and affiliation, which never attest by themselves. Under the museum's rule that a school is recorded only when two independent texts name it, his faith is recorded as unknown, with the Arabic attestations preserved in the data file for a founder's word. ^{1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.