Sufi Muhammad

Sufi Muhammad bin Alhazrat Hassan (Urdu: صوفی محمد بن الحضرت حسن; born 1933 – 11 July 2019) was a Pakistani Sunni Salafi Wahhabi cleric and militant, and the founder of Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), a militant group (declared a terrorist outfit and banned in 2002) vying for implementation of his version of Sharia in Pakistan. It operated mainly in the Dir, 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 Fazlullah, another militant, who assumed the leadership of TNSM during Sufi's imprisonment. He was described by BBC as a "follower" of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi Salafist Islamic school of thought, and by the Jamestown Foundation as one of the "active leaders" of Jamaat-e-Islami in the 1980s.