Sufi Muhammad

Sufi Muhammad bin Alhazrat Hassan was a Pakistani cleric and Islamist militant, the founder of Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), a militant organisation vying for implementation of Sharia in Pakistan. It operates mainly in the Dir region, Swat, and Malakand districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Sufi Muhammad was jailed for sending thousands of volunteers to Afghanistan to fight the U.S. intervention in 2001. However, he was freed in 2008 after he renounced violence. He was the father-in-law of Maulana Fazlullah, who assumed the leadership of TNSM during Sufi's imprisonment. He was described by BBC as a "follower" of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi Islamic school of thought, and by the Jamestown Foundation as one of the "active leaders" of Jamaat-e-Islami in the 1980s.