Geelani helped found the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) in 1993 and served as its chairman from 1998 to 2000. In 2003, he formed his own faction of which he was later elected as the lifetime chairman. He founded the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat party in 2004, which became the leading organisation in the separate "Geelani faction" of the Hurriyat Conference. Geelani served as its chairman until he quit the position in March 2018, though remaining the chairman of his faction of APHC.[4][5] He later quit from his faction in 2020.[1][2]
He was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami Kashmir since 1953, and was regarded as one of its most significant leaders. Geelani was also a three-time Member of the Legislative Assembly from the Sopore constituency, elected on a Jamaat-e-Islami ticket in 1972, 1977 and in 1987.[21][3]
^Cite error: The named reference Nishan-e-Pakistan was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Garner, Chechnya and Kashmir: The Jihadist Evolution (2013), p. 423: "The Jamaat-e-Islami's ideologue, Saeed Ali Shah Geelani, played a key role in political discourse, aiming to discredit and displace the JKLF's agenda and provide a religious rationale for advocating Kashmir's accession to Pakistan. Geelani was one of the first to place the Kashmiri struggle within an Islamist paradigm."
^Sumantra Bose, Syed Ali Shah Geelani: The man who fought for Kashmir’s freedomArchived 3 September 2021 at the Wayback Machine, BBC News, 2 September 2021. "First, he made it clear that although a proud Kashmiri, he considered his national identity to be Pakistani. Second, he was implacably hostile to the idea of an independent Kashmir.... The JKLF leader's amused reaction made light of a deadly schism the two views of freedom - the majority view favouring independence and the minority pro-Pakistan view - had produced in the Kashmiri movement."
^Kaveree Bamzai (30 October 2010). "Syed Ali Shah Geelani: The Man who Hates India". India Today. Archived from the original on 2 September 2021. Retrieved 29 June 2020. But he remains firm on the demand for self-determination, which in his view would lead to Kashmir's accession to Pakistan. He does not want an independent Kashmir, although independence is preferable to "Indian imperialism". He is an ideologue who believes Kashmir should be an Islamic state within a theocratic Pakistan.
^Jamal, Shadow War (2009), pp. 141–143: "Among top leaders of the organization [Jamaat-i-Islami] in 1989, only Syed Ali Shah Geelani was willing to publicly support armed jihad. ... A pro-militancy constituency secretly arranged for Syed Ali Shah Geelani to address the group [of leaders]. When negotiations stalled, Geelani appeared suddenly, made an impassioned speech and, according to accounts of the meeting, succeeded in pushing the group toward openly supporting the jihad [which ended with the creation of Hizbul Mujahideen]."