He was a technocrat who served under the reign of Mohammed Zahir Shah, Dr. Mohammad Yusuf was a Tajik ethnic and the first Afghan prime minister not to be part of the royal family.
After serving as prime minister, he was appointed Ambassador to the Soviet Union, but left this post in 1973 following Daoud Khan's coup.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he went into exile in Germany, where he lived until his death.
[2] His family moved to the west during the fall of the Communist Regime in Afghanistan, to the United States.
Before his political career, Yusuf had a tenure as a professor at Kabul University for over three decades, starting in 1949.