Babrak Karmal befriended fellow inmate Mir Akbar Khyber, who introduced Karmal to Marxism. Karmal changed his name from Sultan Hussein to Babrak Karmal, which means "Comrade of the Workers'" in Pashtun, to disassociate himself from his bourgeois background. When he was released from prison, he continued his activities in the student union, and began to promote Marxism. Karmal spent the rest of the 1950s and the early 1960s becoming involved with Marxist organizations, of which there were at least four in Afghanistan at the time; two of the four were established by Karmal. When the 1964 Afghan Provisional Constitution, which legalised the
Sultan Ali Sultan Ali Sultan Ali ibn Muhammad al-Baqir 'Ali ibn Muhammad ibn 'Ali ibn al-Husayn was the son of the fifth imam of Twelver Shii Muslims and fourth imam of Ismaili Shii Muslims, Muhammad al-Baqir. Born in Medina, 'Ali, known in Iran as "Sultan 'Ali," was dispatched by his father to the areas of Kashan and Qom, where he served as a Friday prayer leader and teacher; his popularity and his preaching of Shii Islam proved threatening to the local representative of the Umayyad dynasty. The Umayyad representative's forces cornered and killed Sultan 'Ali and a band of his supporters, after