Irfan Pathan
Pathan was born 27 October 1984 in Baroda, Gujarat, India and is of Pashtun (Pathan) ancestry, belonging to the Pathan community in Gujarat. He grew up with his elder brother Yusuf in a mosque in Vadodara, in an impoverished family. His father served as the muezzin. Although their parents wished them to become Islamic scholars, Pathan and his brother took an interest in cricket. Their games on the grounds off and inside the mosque often necessitated apologies from their father to Muslim worshippers who visited it. In the beginning his deliveries did not reach the other end of the cricket pitch, but rigorous six-hour training sessions in blazing heat and his family's sense of discipline saw him progress steadily.
Shah Rukh Khan
Khan was born on 2 November 1965 into a Muslim family in New Delhi. He spent the first five years of his life in Mangalore, where his maternal grandfather, Ifthikar Ahmed, served as the chief engineer of the port in the 1960s. According to Khan, his paternal grandfather, Jan Muhammad, an ethnic Pashtun, was from Afghanistan. Khan's father, Meer Taj Mohammed Khan, was an Indian independence activist in Peshawar, British India (present-day Pakistan). As of 2010, Khan's paternal family was still living in the Shah Wali Qataal area of Peshawar's Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Meer was a follower of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and affiliated with the All Indian National Congress. He moved to New Delhi in 1948 after the partition of India. Khan's mother, Lateef Fatima, was the daughter of a senior government engineer. His parents were married in 1959. Khan described himself on Twitter as "half Hyderabadi (mother), half Pathan (father), [and] some Kashmiri (grandmother)". His paternal cousins in Peshawar claim that the family is of Hindkowan origin from Kashmir, not Pashtun, and also contradict the claim that his grandfather was from Afghanistan.