Yousaf Raza Gillani

Yusuf Raza Gilani (born 9 June 1952) is a Pakistani politician who served as the 16th prime minister of Pakistan from 2008 to 2012 and has been chairman of the Senate of Pakistan since 2024. A veteran of the Pakistan Peoples Party from Multan, he was minister under Benazir Bhutto and speaker of the National Assembly from 1993 to 1997, spent nearly six years in prison under the Musharraf government, and as prime minister presided over the restoration of the deposed chief justice and the Eighteenth Amendment before the Supreme Court convicted him of contempt and disqualified him in 2012. He remains the first and only ethnic Saraiki prime minister of Pakistan. ^{1 2}

He was born on 9 June 1952 in Multan, Punjab, to a Saraiki family of Sufi Sayyids; Wikidata instead gives Karachi as his place of birth, and the two are not reconciled in the sources. He later moved to Lahore, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in journalism from Government College University in 1970 and a master's in political journalism from the University of the Punjab in 1976. ^{1 2}

His family's history in Multan is long: his father, Makhdoom Syed Alamdar Hussain Gilani, was a signatory of the Pakistan Resolution and a federal and provincial minister, and his grandfather and great-grandfather held Multan municipal and legislative offices. The article reports the family's purported descent from the Sunni theologian Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani and the Sufi saint Musa al-Jilani — a statement about his ancestry, not about his own affiliation. ¹

He entered politics in 1978 in the Muslim League's central working committee under President Zia-ul-Haq, was elected chairman of the District Council Multan in 1983 and a member of the National Assembly in 1985, and joined the Pakistan Peoples Party in 1988. In Benazir Bhutto's governments he served as minister of tourism (1989–1990) and minister of local government and rural development, and from 1993 to 1997 he was speaker of the National Assembly. ¹

On 11 February 2001 he was arrested by the National Accountability Bureau of the military government on charges that, as speaker, he had misused his authority by placing up to 600 people from his constituency on the government payroll, at a claimed loss of Rs 30 million a year to the exchequer. He was convicted by an anti-corruption court headed by an active-duty officer appointed by General Musharraf and spent nearly six years in Adiala Jail before his release on 7 October 2006. The article reports that the proceedings were widely perceived as politically motivated, and that his imprisonment was widely condemned and read within his party as a mark of loyalty. ¹

Elected prime minister by the National Assembly on 24 March 2008 by 264 votes to 42, he was sworn in the next day. His government is credited in the article with ending the judicial crisis of March 2009 by restoring Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and parliament under him passed the Eighteenth Amendment of 2010, which removed the president's discretionary powers and restored a parliamentary republic. He survived an assassination attempt on his motorcade near Rawalpindi on 3 September 2008. His term was marked by a severe electricity shortage, strained relations with the United States after the 2011 Abbottabad raid and the Salala incident, and deepening conflict with the Supreme Court over its order to reopen corruption cases against President Asif Ali Zardari. ¹

On 26 April 2012 the Supreme Court convicted him of contempt of court for refusing to reopen those cases — the first Pakistani prime minister convicted while in office — and sentenced him symbolically to custody until the rising of the court. On 19 June 2012 the court held him disqualified from parliament with effect from the date of his conviction, and he left office. His disqualification term ended in April 2017. ¹

He returned to parliament as a senator in 2021, defeating the government's finance minister in the Islamabad Senate election, and served as leader of the opposition in the Senate in 2021–2022. In 2024 he was elected chairman of the Senate, and he has repeatedly served as acting president of Pakistan during President Zardari's absences abroad. In 2015 he was ordered to return a necklace donated by the Turkish first lady for the victims of the 2010 floods, which the family had kept after leaving office; in 2021 a video emerged of his son offering cash for votes in the Senate elections, which the Election Commission did not take up. Both episodes are recorded as the article reports them. ¹

The sources do not settle his own affiliation, and what they contain points in different directions. Wikidata's only religion claim is Shia Islam — a single structured value. The English article instead files him in the category "Pakistani Sunni Muslims", which is a filing, not an attestation, and its text names no affiliation for him: its religion content concerns his family's purported descent from a Sunni theologian and a Sufi saint, which is lineage, and the description of his family as Sufi Sayyids, which is family background. His faith is therefore recorded as unclassified. ^{2 1}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.