Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi was born on October 5, 1952, in Lahore, into an affluent Pashtun family at the intersection of Pakistan’s cricketing aristocracy and its colonial-era professional elite. His father, Ikramullah Khan Niazi, was a civil engineer; his mother, Shaukat Khanum, came from the Burki clan, which produced multiple Pakistan cricket captains, including his older cousins Javed Burki and Majid Khan, both of whom led the national side before he did. He had four sisters and was raised in a close family in which his mother — who taught him Islamic history through bedtime stories — was the formative figure.

His education followed a path well-worn by the Pakistani upper class of his generation. The country had been part of British India until 1947, and the families who had done well under colonial rule continued, after independence, to send their sons through an English-medium pipeline that ran from elite Pakistani prep schools to British public schools to Oxford or Cambridge. For that small class, an English degree was less a foreign experience than a normal finishing step, and many of Pakistan’s senior civil servants, generals, judges, and politicians came through the same channel. Khan went the full distance: Aitchison College in Lahore (the prep school favored by Punjabi landed families and military officers), then the Royal Grammar School Worcester in England, then Keble College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and graduated in 1975. His mother’s death from cancer in 1985 became the emotional engine for much of what followed and remains the central wound in his public story.

Cricket made him a national figure long before politics did. He made his Test debut for Pakistan in 1971 at eighteen, took a permanent place in the side after Oxford, and by the early 1980s was one of the world’s leading fast bowlers and all-rounders. He learned the technique of reverse swing from Sarfraz Nawaz, who pioneered it in the 1970s, and later passed it to Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, the pairing that came to define Pakistani fast bowling. Named captain in 1982, he held the role for most of the decade and led Pakistan to its first Test series wins in India and England in 1987. The career-defining moment came in March 1992, when a side that had nearly been knocked out early in the tournament won the World Cup for the first time, with Khan top-scoring in the final against England. He retired immediately afterward at thirty-nine and was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame in 2009. In parallel, through the 1980s, he was a fixture of London social life — Oxford-educated, captain of an exotic touring side, photographed often. His relationships from this period and a contested paternity case in California gave his political opponents decades of material; his religious turn from the late 1980s onward, first toward Sufi mysticism and later toward more orthodox observance, was in part a public answer to the earlier life.

His marriages tracked the arc of that evolution. In 1995 he married Jemima Goldsmith, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of British financier Sir James Goldsmith, in a wedding split between Paris and Surrey. They had two sons, Sulaiman (1996) and Kasim (1999), and divorced in 2004; Jemima found life in Pakistan and the political pressures difficult. A brief second marriage in 2015 to British-Pakistani journalist Reham Khan ended in divorce ten months later. In February 2018, months before his election as prime minister, he married Bushra Bibi, a religious figure who had been his spiritual guide and who wears a full face veil in public. His most enduring non-political legacy is Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore, which he opened in 1994 in his mother’s name and funded by traveling the country and the diaspora collecting donations. The hospital, which now operates a second site in Peshawar and a third under construction in Karachi, says it provides free treatment to roughly 75% of its patients. He later founded Namal University in rural Mianwali (2008) and has written several books, including his 2011 memoir Pakistan: A Personal History.

The path from cricket to politics ran through the cancer hospital. Building it took six years of public fundraising in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which Khan toured Pakistan continuously and saw at close range, by his own account, both the poverty of ordinary patients and the corruption of the state hospitals he was trying to bypass. By the time the hospital opened in 1994 he had become a moralist in public — pious, anti-corruption, contemptuous of the political class — and the leap into electoral politics was a short one. To understand what came next, two features of Pakistani politics matter. First, the country has been ruled directly by the army for roughly half its existence since independence in 1947, and even under civilian governments the military and its intelligence wing — the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI — are widely understood to set the limits of what elected politicians can do, particularly on foreign policy and national security. Civilian prime ministers who lose the army’s backing tend not to finish their terms. Second, two dynastic parties have dominated electoral politics for decades: the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML-N), led by the Sharif family of Punjab, and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), led by the Bhutto-Zardari family of Sindh. Khan’s whole political identity was built against both — against dynastic politics, against what he called their corruption, and, eventually, against the army that had at first helped him into office.

He founded Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI, “Movement for Justice”) in 1996 on that anti-corruption, anti-dynasty platform, and for fifteen years it went almost nowhere. He was widely written off in this period as a vain celebrity dabbling in politics — a former cricketer who didn’t understand how the system worked, who refused to make the local alliances and patronage deals that win seats in Pakistan, and whose moralizing landed flat. He won a single parliamentary seat from his home constituency of Mianwali in 2002 and boycotted the 2008 election. The breakthrough came in 2011 with very large rallies in Lahore and Karachi, drawing crowds that took everyone, including the established parties, by surprise. His core constituency was the urban middle class and young people who were exhausted with the PML-N–PPP duopoly and saw in him an outsider who had actually built something — the hospital — rather than just promising things. PTI emerged from the 2013 election as a serious force and governed the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the country’s northwest, which gave it a record to point to. The 2018 general election made him prime minister at sixty-five, but the path there was paved by the military: the army’s media wing, the courts, and the ISI worked to sideline PML-N — three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was disqualified by the Supreme Court in 2017 — and to engineer defections of “electables,” the locally powerful politicians whose personal followings can swing seats, into PTI. Critics called him the “selected” prime minister rather than the elected one, and the European Union election observation mission, along with major Pakistani journalists, raised concerns about the conditions of the vote.

His record in office was mixed. On the credit side, his government built the largest social-protection program in Pakistan’s history — the Ehsaas initiative — which expanded direct cash transfers to poor households and was praised by the World Bank for its design and reach. The Sehat Sahulat universal health card scheme rolled out hospitalization coverage first in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and then in Punjab, a genuine welfare-delivery achievement in a country where most households pay out of pocket for medical care. His Ten Billion Tree Tsunami reforestation drive drew UN endorsement. Pakistan’s COVID-19 response, which used targeted “smart lockdowns” rather than national ones to protect daily-wage workers, produced better economic and public-health outcomes than most regional peers and was cited approvingly by the WHO. In foreign policy, he kept Pakistan out of the Saudi-led war in Yemen, handled the 2019 Pulwama-Balakot crisis with India in a way most observers credit with de-escalation, and used UN speeches on Islamophobia and Kashmir to build genuine popularity across the Muslim world. On the debit side, the macroeconomic picture was poor — inflation reached multi-decade highs, the rupee fell sharply, and foreign reserves nearly ran out — though how much of this was inherited from the previous PML-N government, worsened by COVID and global commodity shocks, and how much was his government’s own mismanagement is genuinely contested. He returned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF, Pakistan’s lender of last resort, which the country has now turned to more than twenty times since independence) on harder terms while alienating Saudi and American partners; his supporters frame the realignment toward China and a more independent foreign policy as a feature, his critics as costly self-isolation. His accountability drive produced few major convictions and was applied selectively against opponents, and he passed laws criminalizing certain criticism of the military and presided over a media environment that mirrors what is now done to him — the most serious black mark of his time in office, given how it was later turned on him.

The break with the army that defines everything since came over the appointment of the next ISI chief in late 2021, which Khan resisted in a way no civilian prime minister had openly attempted. He was removed in April 2022 through a parliamentary no-confidence vote that he attributed to a US-orchestrated conspiracy executed by the army. His cited evidence was a Pakistani diplomatic cable, known internally as the “cipher,” later published by The Intercept in 2023, in which a US State Department official told the Pakistani ambassador that relations would improve if Khan were removed over his neutrality on the war in Ukraine. The cable is real and the US pressure was real; whether it amounts to a “conspiracy” or to ordinary great-power signalling that the army then chose to act on is the genuine point of dispute.

What followed has no clear precedent in Pakistani politics. Out of office, Khan openly named and attacked the army chief and the ISI in mass rallies, accused them of orchestrating an assassination attempt against him after he survived a shooting at a 2022 rally in Wazirabad, and built a confrontation with the military that almost no civilian politician has attempted. He was first arrested in May 2023 inside the Islamabad High Court, triggering nationwide protests in which PTI supporters attacked the Lahore Corps Commander’s House, the army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, and various military monuments — a line in a country that has fought four wars, and one for which much of the establishment has not forgiven him or his party. Briefly released, he was re-arrested in August 2023 in the Toshakhana case, concerning state gifts a prime minister is expected to deposit in the official treasury of that name and which Khan was accused of selling, and has been held since at Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi as Prisoner No. 804. He now faces over 180 cases, with convictions across corruption, leaking state secrets (the cipher case, which the Islamabad High Court overturned in June 2024), and the contested “iddat” case, in which he was convicted of marrying Bushra Bibi before the end of the iddat — the waiting period a Muslim woman is required to observe after divorce before remarrying. In June 2024, a United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that his detention had no legal basis. In February 2026, a Supreme Court-appointed lawyer reported that Khan had been left with about 15% vision in his right eye after a retinal vein occlusion went untreated for months in custody; the government disputes that account, and a subsequent medical board reported partial improvement following anti-VEGF treatment.

He remains the most popular politician in the country. In the February 2024 election PTI was barred from contesting as a party, but candidates running as independents won the most seats anyway; they were unable to form a government, and a coalition of PML-N and PPP took power amid widespread allegations of rigging that have not been credibly answered. PTI has run waves of protests since, with his sister Aleema Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi, herself in and out of custody, increasingly visible as proxies. The fair summary is that he is a genuinely popular politician, treated in ways that fall well below any reasonable rule-of-law standard, who is also a flawed and authoritarian leader whose own choices in office contributed to his downfall. The arc is unusual even by the standards of celebrity politicians: born into elite privilege, global sports figure in his thirties, London socialite in parallel, philanthropist in his forties, opposition politician through his fifties and most of his sixties, prime minister at sixty-five, prisoner from seventy onward.