Hafiz Saeed

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed was born in a family of Sargodha, Punjab. As told by him, his father, Kamal-ud-Din, a farmer, along with his family started migrating from East Punjab and reached Pakistan in around four months in the autumn of 1947. His family lost 36 of its members when migrating from Hisar, Haryana to Lahore during the partition of India.

A major early influence on his life and ideology was his maternal uncle, and later father-in-law, Hafiz Abdullah Bahawalpuri, who was a famed theologian belonging to the Ahl-i Hadith, a Wahhabi group considered the most extreme in its theological positions, who held that democracy was incompatible with Islam and argued, on the importance of jihad, “that only in jihad does one offer one’s life in the way of Allah, which elevates it to a higher plane than merely fulfilling other religious responsibilities such as saying prayers and paying zakat, also entailing sacrifices and adjustments, but not at the scale evident in jihad” and “considered shahadat (martyrdom) to be the crux of jihad.” Bahawalpuri’s only son, Abdul Rehman Makki, is Saeed’s brother-in-law and has been described as “his close partner.”