Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.
The Safavid dynasty was one of Iran's most significant ruling dynasties reigning from 1501 to 1736. Their rule is often considered the beginning of modern Iranian history, as well as one of the gunpowder empires. The Safavid Shāh Ismā'īl I established the Twelver denomination of Shīʿa Islam as the official religion of the Persian Empire, marking one of the most important turning points in the history of Islam. The Safavid dynasty had its origin in the Safavid order of Sufism, which was established in the city of Ardabil in the Iranian Azerbaijan region. It was an Iranian dynasty of Kurdish origin, but during their rule they intermarried with Turkoman, Georgian, Circassian, and Pontic Greek dignitaries, nevertheless, for practical purposes, they were Turkic-speaking and Turkified. From their base in Ardabil, the Safavids established control over parts of Greater Iran and reasserted the Iranian identity of the region, thus becoming the first native dynasty since the Sasanian Empire to establish a national state officially known as Iran.
The Tahirid dynasty was an Arabized Sunni Muslim dynasty of Persian dehqan origin that ruled as governors of Khorasan from 821 to 873 as well as serving as military and security commanders in Abbasid Baghdad until 891. The dynasty was founded by Tahir ibn Husayn, a leading general in the service of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun. For his support of al-Ma'mun in the Fourth Fitna, he was granted the governance of Khorasan.
The Qajar dynasty was an Iranian dynasty founded by Mohammad Khan of the Qoyunlu clan of the Turkoman Qajar tribe.
Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, also known as Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn Asadābādī and commonly known as Al-Afghani, was a political activist and Islamic ideologist who travelled throughout the Muslim world during the late 19th century. He is one of the founders of Islamic Modernism as well as an advocate of Pan-Islamic unity in India against the British, he has been described as having been less interested in minor differences in Islamic jurisprudence than he was in organizing a united response to Western pressure. He is also known for his involvement with his follower Mirza Reza Kermani in the successful plot to assassinate Shah Naser-al-Din, whom Afghani considered to be making too many concessions to foreign powers, especially the British Empire.
Greater Khorāsān or Khorāsān or Khurāsān is a historical eastern region in the Iranian Plateau between West and Central Asia that encompasses western Afghanistan, northeastern Iran, the eastern halves of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, western Tajikistan, and portions of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Clifford Edmund Bosworth FBA was an English historian and Orientalist, specialising in Arabic and Iranian studies.
The 1992–1996 Afghan Civil War, also known as the Second Afghan Civil War, took place between 28 April 1992—the date a new interim Afghan government was supposed to replace the Republic of Afghanistan of President Mohammad Najibullah—and the Taliban's conquest of Kabul establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on 27 September 1996.
Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains offices in London, New York, Shanghai, Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong, Delhi, and Johannesburg.
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is an American historian who is Gurney Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he taught courses on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East and is an expert on Iranian culture. Mottahedeh served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1987 to 1990, and as the inaugural director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University from 2005 to 2011. He is a follower of the Baha'i faith.
The Tarakai or Taraki is a Khilji Pashtun tribe; mainly found in the Ghazni province of Afghanistan and large numbers of tribe mans are also settled in Pakistan mainly in Quetta, Piashine, Zhob, Lorallai, Dukki, Sherani and Swabi. They are divided into several major clans/tribes: Nawrozkhel, Nakhel, Jamalkhel, Harunkhel, Malangkhel, Akhtarkhel, Daryakhel, Mullakhel, Lilizai, Mul, Gurbuz, Badin, Saki, and MurekKhel. These tribes are further divided into more sub-tribes within the above-mentioned clans/tribes.
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 Shura-e Nazar was created by Ahmad Shah Massoud in 1984 at the northern provinces of Takhar, Badakhshan, Balkh and Kunduz, during the Soviet-Afghan War. It comprised and united about 130 resistance commanders from 12 northern, eastern and central regions of Afghanistan.
Prof. Shahram Akbarzadeh is based at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Prior to his commencing his appointment at Deakin University in 2014, he was professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Melbourne. Akbarzadeh completed his M.A. in Russian and East European Studies at Birmingham University in 1992 and acquired a PhD at La Trobe University in 1998. He served as the Central and West Asia Councillor for the Asian Studies Association of Australia from 1999 to 2004. His numerous publications include works on Middle East politics, Central Asian politics and the politics of radicalisation among the Muslim community of Australia.
On 24 April 1992, the Peshawar Accord was announced by several but not all Afghan mujahideen parties: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb-e Islami, had since March 1992 opposed these attempts at a coalition government.
The Islamabad Accord was a peace and power-sharing agreement signed on 7 March 1993 between the warring parties in the War in Afghanistan (1992–1996), one party being the Islamic State of Afghanistan and the other an alliance of militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The Defense Minister of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, resigned his position in exchange for peace, as requested by Hekmatyar who saw Massoud as a personal rival. Hekmatyar took the long-offered position of prime minister. The agreement proved short-lived, however, as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his allies soon resumed the bombardment of Kabul.
The 1995 attack on the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul occurred on 6 September 1995 when up to 5,000 protestors attacked and sacked the embassy of Pakistan in Kabul, Afghanistan, after the Taliban militia had captured Herat from the internationally recognised Islamic State of Afghanistan. One person was killed and twenty six others, including the Pakistani ambassador, were injured. The attack occurred due to the Afghan peoples belief that Pakistan had helped the Taliban to take the city.
Shaban Jafari, often known as Shaban the Brainless or Shaban the Crown-Bestower, was an Iranian political activist and practitioner of varzesh-e bastani. A controversial figure in Iranian politics, he was instrumental in overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh's government in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état.
Abbas Amanat is an Iranian-born American historian, scholar, author, editor, and university professor. He serves as the William Graham Sumner Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies.
Rudolph P. Matthee, best known as Rudi Matthee, is John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of History in the History Department at the University of Delaware, teaching Middle Eastern history and specializing in the history of early modern Iran. He received his PhD in 1991 from the University of California. Matthee is a member of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies, for which he also functioned as president twice in 2003-2005 and 2009–2011. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Safavid and Qajar Iran.
