Nematullah Shahrani (born 1941) is a prominent Afghan scholar. [1] He was one of four Vice Presidents of the Afghan Transitional Administration from 2002 to 2004. Shahrani also headed of the Afghan Constitution Commission. [2]
He has written more than 30 books and several hundred academic articles. He belongs to an academic family that is known in Afghanistan as the family of scholars. [3] He studied at Kabul University, Al-Azhar University (Cairo) and The George Washington University (U.S.).
From Badakhshan Province in northern Afghanistan, Shahrani is an ethnic Uzbek. Although he was one of the ideological figures behind the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was never involved in any sectarian, party and other ethnic conflicts in Afghanistan. For that he earned the nickname of Mr. Clean.
Currently some of his family members teach at academic institutions in the United States (such as Indiana University Bloomington) and the United Kingdom.
Afghans are the citizens and nationals of Afghanistan, as well as their descendants in the Afghan diaspora. The country is made up of various ethnic groups, of which Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks are the largest. The three main languages spoken among the Afghan people are Dari, Pashto, and Uzbek. Historically, the term "Afghan" was a Pashtun ethnonym, but later came to refer to all people in the country, regardless of their ethnicity.
Burhānuddīn Rabbānī was an Afghan politician and teacher who served as president of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, and again from November to December 2001.
Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad is an American diplomat and foreign policy expert. Khalilzad was U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation from September 2018 to October 2021. Khailzad was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as United States ambassador to the United Nations, serving in the role from 2007 to 2009. Khalilzad was the highest ranking Muslim-American in government at the time he left the position. Prior to this, Khalilzad served in the Bush administration as ambassador to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005 and Ambassador to Iraq from 2005 to 2007.
Kunduz is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, located in the northern part of the country next to Tajikistan. The population of the province is around 1,136,677, which is mostly a tribal society; it is one of Afghanistan's most ethnically diverse provinces with many different ethnicities in large numbers living there. The city of Kunduz serves as the capital of the province. It borders the provinces of Takhar, Baghlan, Samangan and Balkh, as well as the Khatlon Region of Tajikistan. The Kunduz Airport is located next to the provincial capital.
The Wakhan Corridor is a narrow strip of territory in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan. This corridor stretches eastward, connecting Afghanistan to Xinjiang, China. It also separates the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan in the north from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan regions of Pakistan in the south, the latter of which is also part of the disputed region of Kashmir. This high mountain valley, which rises to a maximum altitude of 4,923 m (16,152 ft), serves as the source of both the Panj and Pamir rivers, which converge to form the larger Amu Darya River. For countless centuries, a vital trade route has traversed this valley, facilitating the movement of travelers to and from East, South, and Central Asia.
The Wakhi people, also locally referred to as the Wokhik, are an Iranian ethnic group native to Central and South Asia. They are found in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and China—primarily situated in and around Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor, the northernmost part of Pakistan's Gilgit−Baltistan and Chitral, Tajikistan's Gorno−Badakhshan Autonomous Region and the southwestern areas of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The Wakhi people are native speakers of the Wakhi language, an Eastern Iranian language.
The Marshall Scholarship is a postgraduate scholarship for "intellectually distinguished young Americans [and] their country's future leaders" to study at any university in the United Kingdom. It is widely considered one of the most prestigious scholarships for U.S. citizens, and along with the Fulbright Scholarship, it is the only broadly available scholarship available to Americans to study at any university in the United Kingdom.
Habibullah Kalakani, derided by the Pashtuns as "Bacha-ye Saqao", was the ruler of Afghanistan from 17 January to 13 October 1929, as well as a leader of the Saqqawists. During the Afghan Civil War (1928–1929), he captured vast swathes of Afghanistan and ruled Kabul during what is known in Afghan historiography as the "Saqqawist period". He was an ethnic Tajik. No country recognized Kalakani as ruler of Afghanistan.
Professor Abdul Ghafoor Ravan Farhâdi is an Afghan academic and diplomat who served as Afghanistan's Ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 2006.
Dr. Mohammad Yusuf was Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Afghanistan from March 10, 1963, to November 2, 1965. He was a technocrat who served under the reign of Mohammed Zahir Shah, Dr. Mohammad Yusuf was a Tajik ethnic and the first Afghan prime minister not to be part of the royal family. He resigned on October 29, 1965.
The Tajikistan–Afghanistan Friendship Bridge connects the two banks of Darvaz region across the Panj River separating Tajikistan and Afghanistan, at the town of Qal'ai Khumb. It was opened on 6 July 2004.
M. Nazif Shahrani is a professor of anthropology, Central Asian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Taher Badakhshi was a cultural and political personality in Afghanistan. He had performed a large variety of cultural and political activities in Afghanistan including organisation of different scale gatherings of authors, journalists and writers of the country and hosting meetings in which the intelligentsia of different cultural and political backgrounds came together for discussions, and he was the founder of "Revolutionary Organization of the Toilers of Afghanistan", a liberal leftist group with affinity to the Non-Aligned Movement that was founded in Yugoslavia in 1956, triggered by Josip Broz Tito, and promoted by the two most pivotal personalities in the global South: Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser. The group has also had a firm touch to the liberal principles and heterogeneous ideas of liberalism and modernism, and of course in the very temporal and geographic context of the country, it had affinities to the leftist liberation and anti-colonial movements in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Afghan Americans are Americans with ancestry from Afghanistan. They form the largest Afghan community in North America with the second being Afghan Canadians. Afghan Americans may originate from any of the ethnic groups of Afghanistan.
Nimatullah, also spelled Ni'matullāh, Nematollah etc. is an Arabic male given name.
Abdul Qayyum "Zakir", also known by the nom de guerre Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, is a Taliban militant commander and the acting Deputy Minister of Defense of the internationally unrecognized Taliban regime currently ruling Afghanistan. He was also the acting Defense Minister of the Taliban, from 24 August 2021 to 7 September 2021.
The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice is the state agency in charge of implementing Islamic law in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as defined by the Taliban. It was first instituted in 1992 by the Rabbani government of the Islamic State of Afghanistan and adopted in 1996 by the Taliban government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan of 1996–2001. The ministry was restored in the reinstated Islamic Emirate in September 2021 after the August fall of Kabul.
The Musahiban are a Mohammadzai family who founded the Afghan Barakzai dynasty, and members of the royal lineage that ruled Afghanistan as emir, king or president from 1823 to 1978. They descend from Sultan Mohammad Khan Telai (1795–1861) and his older brother Emir Dost Mohammad Khan (1792–1863), and were the last rulers of the Mohammadzai dynasty before being overthrown in the Saur Revolution in April 1978.
The Wakhjir Pass, also spelled Vakhjir Pass, is a mountain pass in the Hindu Kush or Pamirs at the eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor, the only potentially navigable pass between Afghanistan and China in the modern era. It links Wakhan in Afghanistan with the Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in Xinjiang, China, at an altitude of 4,923 metres (16,152 ft). The pass is not an official border crossing point. With a difference of 3.5 hours, the Afghanistan–China border has the sharpest official change of clocks of any international frontier. China refers to the pass as South Wakhjir Pass, as there is a northern pass on the Chinese side.
Farah University is located in Farah province, Afghanistan.