Abdul Salam Hanafi

Abdul Salam Hanafi Uzbek/Dari: عَبْدَالسَّلَامُ حَنَفٍی) is an Afghan Uzbek political and Deobandi-Islamic^[1] religious leader. He is a senior leader of the Taliban, an acting second deputy prime minister, alongside Abdul Ghani Baradar and Abdul Kabir, of Afghanistan since 2021.

Mawlawi Abdul Salam Hanafi
عَبْدَالسَّلَامُ حَنَفٍی
Hanafi in 2019
Deputy Prime Minister for Administrative Affairs of Afghanistan[broken anchor]
Acting
Assumed office 7 September 2021
Leader	Hibatullah Akhundzada
Prime Minister	Hassan Akhund (acting)
Personal details
Born	1969 (age 55–56) Sheberghan, Afghanistan
Political affiliation	Taliban
Ethnicity	Uzbek

Abdul Salam Hanafi is from Jowzjan Province in northern Afghanistan.^[2] He has studied at various religious seminaries in Karachi, Pakistan.

Early life and education

An ethnic Uzbek, Hanafi was born in 1969 in Jowzjan Province.^[3]

He later moved to Pakistan for further religious studies. He studied the traditional Islamic sciences, mathematics, logic and other subjects at a university called Jamia Darul Uloom in Karachi.

Outside religion he also studied computer science, accounting and languages, mastering, outside his native Uzbek, Pashto, Persian, English, Arabic, Urdu, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Turkish.