Early Life
Yahya Khan was born on 4 February 1917 near Peshawar, in what is now Pakistan. His family descended from the elite soldier class of Nader Shah of Khorasan. Khan is described as an ethnic Pashtun.
Few Pakistanis knew anything about Yahya Khan when he was vaulted into the presidency two years ago. The stocky, bushy-browed Pathan had been army chief of staff since 1966. —Time MagazineIt is unknown if his family was Persian and became Pashtunized or if they belonged to the Abdali Pashtun tribe, who were led by Ahmad Shah Durrani during their 1738 occupation of Peshawar.
Read more about this topic: Yahya Khan
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)