Sayed Isma'el Balkhi (Dari: سید اسماعیل بلخی) (1918 –14 July 1968) was one of the most prominent Hazara reformist leaders in 20th-century Afghanistan.

[2] Sayed Ismael Balkhi was born in 1918 in Balkhab district, Sar-e Pol province in Northern Afghanistan.

A religious activist, Balkhi was concerned during the liberal late 1940s period in Afghanistan, eventually becoming a political radical.

The plan was foiled, and Balkhi spent some years in prison under the charges of conspiring to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic.

[3] The dynamism of Balkhi's personality is that he got his education in an environment (i.e. Iraq) where clerics were either turned into radical revolutionaries like Khomeini and Khamenei or into self-absorbed mystics or study-oriented scholars.