Background
Imran Khan was
born in Lahore into a family of Pashtun origin, the only son of
Ikramullah Khan Niazi, a civil engineer, and his wife Shaukat Khanum. Long settled in Mianwali in northwestern Punjab, the family are of Pashtun ethnicity and belong to
the Niazi Shermankhel tribe. Niazi
is a branch of Lohani pashtuns. A quiet and shy
boy in his youth, Khan grew up with his four sisters in relatively affluent
(upper middle-class) circumstances and received a privileged education. He was
educated at Aitchison College in Lahore, the Royal Grammar
School Worcester in England, where he excelled at cricket, and in 1972 he went up
to Keble College, Oxford
where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts.
Khan's mother
hailed from the Burki family which had produced
several successful cricketers, including such household names as cricketers Javed
Burki, Majid Khan
and, paternally (from the Niazi tribe then), to Misbah-ul-Haq.
Khan is also a
descendant of the Sufi warrior-poet and inventor of the Pashto alphabet, Pir
Roshan, who hailed from his maternal family's ancestral Kaniguram town in South Waziristan, and a cousin
to one of Pakistan's leading English-language columnist, Khaled Ahmed.
On 16 May 1995,
Khan married Jemima Goldsmith, in
a two-minute ceremony conducted in Urdu in Paris.
A month later, on 21 June, they were married again in a civil ceremony at the Richmond registry office in
Rumours circulated that the couple's marriage was in
crisis, Jemima denied that publishing an advertisement in Pakistani newspapers.
On 22 June 2004, it was announced that the Khans had divorced, ending the
nine-year marriage because it was "difficult for Jemima to adapt to life
in
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