The Muslim Youth Organization was founded in 1969 in Kabul, at a critical point in Afghanistan's history, with proponents of communism and Qutb-inspired Islamism vying fiercely to gain supremacy in determining the direction of the state and society.
Kabul University was a center of this conflict, with both Marxists and Islamists on the faculty and corresponding student organizations dedicated to the respective ideologies.
One professor of the Shar`ia faculty (the department for the study of Islamic law), the future mujahidin leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, had recently translated Sayyid Qutb's Milestones (Ma`alim fi'l-tariq) into Dari and was teaching this text at the university.
It was in this context that the Muslim Youth Organization was formed, and at its founding Rabbani was named its chairman, Sayyaf its vice-chairman, and Hekmatyar—though still in prison for the murder of a Maoist student—its political director.
Its leaders continued to pursue its mission, however, and eventually went on to lead a successful insurgency war against the Marxist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, backed by the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989.