Who Is Imran Khan?

1. From Lahore to Oxford: the early years

Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi was born on 5 October 1952 in Lahore, in what was then the young state of Pakistan. His father, Ikramullah Khan Niazi, was a civil engineer, and his mother, Shaukat Khanum, came from a family of cricketers. He grew up in a comfortable, English-speaking household in Lahore and was educated at Aitchison College, one of Pakistan's most prominent schools, where his talent for cricket first became obvious. As a teenager he was sent to England, to the Royal Grammar School in Worcester, a move that put him close to the English county cricket system and to the universities that would shape his adult life.

In 1972 he went up to Keble College, Oxford, to read philosophy, politics and economics. Oxford gave him two things that mattered for the rest of his life. The first was a degree from one of the world's best-known universities, which marked him out in Pakistan as a member of a small Western-educated elite. The second was three years of first-class cricket for Oxford University and for Worcestershire, where he learned to bowl fast in English conditions and to think about the game as a captain. He has often said that Oxford taught him to question authority, a habit that later showed up in both his cricket captaincy and his politics.

His mother's death from cancer in 1985 became the defining personal event of his life. He was playing cricket in Australia when she died, and he has described the experience of watching her suffer in a country with almost no cancer treatment as the moment that changed his priorities. It led directly to the hospital he later built in her name, and it gave him a public cause that reached far beyond cricket. By the time he retired from the game in 1992, he was already one of the most famous Pakistanis alive, and he was beginning to think about what to do with that fame.

2. The cricketer: twenty-one years at the top

Khan made his Test debut for Pakistan against England at Edgbaston in June 1971, aged eighteen. He was a raw, quick bowler then, and it took him several years to become a complete cricketer. The turning point came in the late 1970s, when he remodelled his bowling action and added a dangerous outswinger, and when he began to bat seriously in the middle order. By the early 1980s he was one of the few genuine all-rounders in world cricket, a fast bowler who could change a match with the ball and a batsman good enough to score Test centuries. Across 88 Test matches he scored 3,807 runs and took 362 wickets, figures that place him among the greatest all-rounders the game has produced.

He captained Pakistan in three separate spells between 1982 and 1992, and his leadership is remembered as much as his playing record. He was demanding, sometimes abrasive, and he insisted on professional standards that were unusual in Pakistani cricket at the time, from fitness and fielding to the selection of players on merit rather than regional or personal ties. He also championed the use of a neutral umpire system and fought the cricket establishment over pay and conditions. Players who served under him describe a captain who gave his team belief, and who was at his best when Pakistan were written off.

The peak came at the 1992 Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Pakistan lost three of their first five matches and were close to elimination, but Khan, who had come out of retirement at the request of Pakistan's president, rallied the team with a famous dressing-room speech in which he told them to fight like cornered tigers. Pakistan won their remaining matches, beat New Zealand in the semi-final, and defeated England by 22 runs in the final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 25 March 1992. Khan scored 72 in the final and took the last wicket. It remains Pakistan's only World Cup title, and it is the achievement for which he is best remembered in cricket.

3. Philanthropy: the hospital and the university

After his mother's death, Khan spent years raising money for a cancer hospital in Lahore that would treat poor patients free of charge. The project was widely doubted at first: Pakistan had almost no tradition of large-scale charitable hospitals, and many people thought a cricket star could not raise the money or manage the institution. Khan toured the country and the world, holding fundraising dinners and using his fame to persuade donors, and the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre opened in Lahore in December 1994. It was the first hospital of its kind in Pakistan, and it remains one of the country's most respected charitable institutions, treating a large share of its patients without charge.

A second Shaukat Khanum hospital later opened in Peshawar, and a third was developed in Karachi, extending the network across the country. The hospitals are funded largely by donations and by the zakat contributions of ordinary Pakistanis, and their annual fundraising appeals are among the most visible charitable campaigns in the country. Khan's role in building them is the least contested part of his public record: even his political opponents rarely dispute that the hospitals are a genuine achievement, and they gave him a reputation for getting things done outside government that later helped his political career.

He also founded Namal University in Mianwali, in the district his family came from, which opened in 2008. The university was built on land he donated and was designed to bring higher education to a part of Punjab that had almost none. It began as a college affiliated with the University of Bradford in England and later became a full university. Together, the hospital and the university gave Khan a story that no other Pakistani politician could match: a record of building institutions with public money, transparently and at scale, before he ever held office.

4. The politician: building the PTI

Khan founded the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the Movement for Justice, on 25 April 1996. Its message was simple: Pakistan's problems came from a corrupt political elite, and only a clean leader could fix them. For a long time the party went nowhere. It won no seats in the 1997 election, and in 2002 Khan himself won just one seat, from Mianwali, as the party's only member of parliament. He boycotted the 2008 election, and for years he was treated by the established parties as a marginal figure with a famous name and no organisation. What kept the party alive was Khan's personal following, especially among young, urban Pakistanis who had never voted for the older parties.

The breakthrough came in 2011, when a huge rally in Lahore showed that the PTI could draw crowds that rivalled the established parties. Khan's message of change, his promise of a welfare state modelled on the early Islamic community and on Scandinavian social democracy, and his attacks on corruption and on American drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas, found an audience among voters who felt the old parties had failed them. In the 2013 election the PTI finished second by votes and formed the government in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, giving it its first experience of running a government.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the party promoted police reform, health insurance for poor families and a campaign to plant trees, policies it later presented as a model for the whole country. At the national level, Khan led long protests against the government of Nawaz Sharif, including a four-month sit-in in Islamabad in 2014, arguing that the 2013 election had been rigged. His critics accused him of undermining democratic government and of being helped by the military establishment, a charge he has always denied. His supporters saw the protests as the only way to challenge a system that protected the powerful. The dispute about how much of his rise was his own doing, and how much was helped by others, has never been settled.

5. Prime minister, 2018 to 2022

In the general election of July 2018 the PTI won the most seats in the National Assembly, and Khan became prime minister on 18 August 2018, leading a coalition government. He promised a new Pakistan: a welfare state, an end to corruption, ten million jobs, five million homes, and a foreign policy that would put Pakistan first. His first years in office were dominated by a severe economic crisis. Pakistan's foreign reserves were low, the rupee was falling, and his government turned to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout and to friendly countries for loans. Supporters say he inherited an economy in deep trouble; critics say his government made it worse through indecision and by abandoning its own economic promises.

His government introduced a national health insurance card for poor families, expanded the Ehsaas cash-transfer programme for the poorest households, and launched a large tree-planting campaign. It also opened the Kartarpur Corridor, allowing Sikh pilgrims from India to visit a holy shrine in Pakistan, a move that was widely praised. On foreign policy he pursued closer ties with China, spoke out against Islamophobia at the United Nations, and took a public position against the American war in Afghanistan, arguing that Pakistan should not be drawn into other countries' wars. His handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which combined targeted lockdowns with cash support for the poor, was praised by some international observers and criticised by others.

By 2021 the coalition was fraying. Inflation was high, the economy was struggling, and coalition partners and members of his own party were drifting away. Opposition parties, which had formed an alliance called the Pakistan Democratic Movement, accused his government of incompetence and of stifling dissent, and pointed to pressure on journalists and critics. His supporters replied that he was being undermined by the same elite he had promised to take on, and that the economy's problems were the result of decades of mismanagement by his predecessors. In March 2022 the opposition tabled a vote of no confidence, and after a disputed attempt to block it, the Supreme Court ruled that the move was unconstitutional. On 10 April 2022 Khan lost the vote and was removed from office, the first Pakistani prime minister to be removed by a vote of no confidence.

6. Removal, protest and the cases against him

After his removal, Khan became the most popular politician in the country by most measures of public support, drawing enormous crowds and winning a series of by-elections for his party. He accused the United States of conspiring with the opposition to remove him, citing a diplomatic cable, a claim that the United States denied and that Pakistan's own National Security Committee found no evidence of a foreign conspiracy in. He also accused the military leadership, and in particular the army chief, of orchestrating his removal, a charge the military rejected. The dispute over why he was removed remains one of the most contested questions in Pakistani politics, and it is a subject on which reliable evidence is thin and public claims are many.

On 9 May 2023, after he was arrested by paramilitary troops inside a court in Islamabad, violent protests broke out across the country. Protesters attacked military installations, including the corps commander's house in Lahore and the army headquarters in Rawalpindi. The authorities responded with mass arrests, and thousands of PTI workers and leaders were detained. Khan condemned the violence but also said it was a reaction to his arrest. The military described 9 May as a dark day and said those responsible would be tried, including in military courts. Khan faces pending trials connected with the events of 9 May, and he denies inciting violence.

The legal cases against him multiplied after his removal. The first conviction came in the Toshakhana case, which concerned gifts he received as prime minister and was accused of selling without declaring. He was arrested on 5 August 2023 and sentenced to three years. Further convictions followed, including a case concerning the leaking of a diplomatic cable, in which he was sentenced to ten years, and the Al-Qadir Trust case, concerning a property settlement said to be worth 190 million pounds, in which he and his wife Bushra Bibi were sentenced in January 2025 to fourteen and seven years respectively. He was also convicted in a further Toshakhana case in December 2025, receiving a ten-year term while his wife received seven years. Some earlier convictions were suspended or overturned on appeal, and his appeals against the remaining convictions were still pending in November 2026. He denies all wrongdoing.

7. Imprisonment and a contested legacy

As of November 2026, Khan has been in prison for more than three years, held in Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi. His meetings with family, lawyers and party leaders have been heavily restricted, and the Islamabad High Court has repeatedly had to direct the authorities to allow access. In November 2026 his lawyers reported that he was suffering from an eye condition, central retinal vein occlusion, and that he had been taken to hospital in Islamabad during the night of 10 to 11 November for treatment. His sisters were detained in September 2026 ahead of a planned protest, and two of them were released on 12 November 2026 after the authorities withdrew their detention orders. His health, his conditions in prison and the restrictions on his access to the outside world have become subjects of public debate in Pakistan and abroad.

The two sides of the argument about Khan can be stated plainly. His supporters say that a popular leader who won elections and challenged the powerful is being kept in prison on cases they describe as politically motivated, that his party has been suppressed, and that his treatment shows Pakistan's democratic institutions have failed. They point to the crowds he drew, the by-elections his party won, and the restrictions on his party's campaigning as evidence that he is being kept from power by force rather than by the ballot box. His critics say that he is facing the consequences of his own actions, that the courts have found him guilty on evidence, that his rhetoric encouraged the violence of May 2023, and that his time in office was marked by economic failure and attacks on democratic norms. Both accounts are widely believed in Pakistan, and neither has been accepted by the other side.

What is not in dispute is the scale of Khan's influence. He is the only Pakistani to have led his country to a World Cup, to have built a hospital network from nothing, and to have founded a political party that went from a single seat to forming the national government. He changed the language of Pakistani politics, making corruption and accountability central issues, and he brought a generation of young voters into politics. Whether history remembers him primarily as a cricketer, a philanthropist, a reformer or a divisive populist will depend on what happens next, and in particular on the outcome of the appeals still before the courts. Until those are decided, any final judgement about the legal cases against him is premature, and this article will not offer one.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Imran Khan
• Wikipedia — Imran Khan
• Al Jazeera — Imran Khan (topic page)

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• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.