Syed Ali Shah Geelani (1929–2021) was an Islamist, pro-Pakistani, Jihadist, Kashmiri-separatist leader in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, regarded as the father of the Kashmiri jihad. Geelani helped found the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) in 1993 and served as its chairman from 1998 to 2000. In 2003, he formed his own faction of which he was later elected as the lifetime chairman. He founded the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat party in 2004, which became the leading organisation in tte separate "Geelani faction" of the Hurriyat Conference. Geelani served as its chairman until he quit the position in March 2018, though remaining the chairman of his faction of APHC. He later quit from his faction in 2020. He was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami Kashmir since 1953, and was regarded as one of its most significant leaders. Geelani was also a three-time Member of the Legislative Assembly from the Sopore constituency, elected on a Jamaat-e-Islami ticket in 1972, 1977 and in 1987. Early life Syed Ali Geelani was born in 1929 in a village called Zurimanj, in the Bandipora tehsil, in the Baramulla district of North Kashmir. He was the son of a landless labourer in the canals department. Geelani was educated partly in Sopore (his ancestral village) and the rest in Lahore. He studied in a madrasa attached to the Masjid Wazir Khan and later enrolled in the Oriental College. He completed Adib 'Alim, a course in Islamic theology. Political career Returning to Kashmir after studies in Lahore, Geelani became active in the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference. He was appointed the secretary of the party unit in Zurimanz. In 1946, during the Quit Kashmir movement of the National Conference, he came in contact with Maulana Sayeed Masoodi, the general secretary of the National Conference, who took a liking to him and made him a reporter to the party newspaper Akhbar-i-Khidmat. Masoodi also sponsored further studies for Geelani, who completed an adib-i-fazil course in Urdu and other courses in Persian and English. After this, he took a job as a school teacher, first at Pathar Masjid and later at Rainawari in Srinagar. Here he came in contact with Saaduddin Tarabali, a follower of the Jamaat-e-Islami founder Maulana Abul A'la Maududi. Maududi advocated a hardline Islamist ideology, whereby Islam had to be the foundation of the entire political order. Geelani had borrowed a book of Maududi from the local book store,