Faqir of Ipi - Early Life

Early Life

Mirza Ali Khan was born in 1897 in Shankai Kairta, which is located near Khajuri Post in North Waziristan Agency. His family was from the Bangal Khel clan of the Haibati Madda Khel section of the Tori Khel Wazirs, which belongs to the greater Utmanzai branch concentrated in North Waziristan. His father was a religious man, named Arsala Khan. Mirza first went to religious schools on the British side of the border, and eventually, to a place near Jalalabad, where he became a Murid (pupil) of the Naqib of Chaharbagh, at the time the most famous and influential religious leader in Afghanistan. In 1923 Mirza Ali Khan performed the Hajj in Mecca and thereafter settled down in the village of Ipi, situated near the British military road connecting Bannu and Razmak. He was known as a peaceful, religious preacher. There he gradually acquired the reputation of saintliness among the clan of Daurs, but not attracting as yet the attention of the authorities as a potential agitator.

(Mr. Jahangir Khan Sikandri, while presenting the story of the Islam Bibi here, has categorically objected that the picture given on this page in the Encycleopedea is not that of the Faqir of Ipi but of Shami Pir who appeared in Kanigram as a pir and was actually plotted by Hitler to rethrone Amir Aman Ullah Khan who was then in exile in Italy. Shami Pir was exiled by the British forcibly from Waziristan and sent back to Iraq.)