List of Famous people born in Balkh, Afghanistan

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, Mevlânâ/Mawlānā, Mevlevî/Mawlawī, and more popularly simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, Hanafi faqih, Islamic scholar, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. Rumi's influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Tajiks, Turks, Greeks, Pashtuns, other Central Asian Muslims, and the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. Rumi has been described as the "most popular poet" and the "best selling poet" in the United States.

Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad is an Afghan-American diplomat, who has served as the Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at the State Department since September 2018. Previously, he served as a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the president of Gryphon Partners and Khalilzad Associates, an international business consulting firm, based in Washington, D.C.

Abdul Ali Mazari was a Shiite militia and political leader of the Hezb-e Wahdat party during and following the Soviet–Afghan War. Mazari was an ethnic Hazara from Parwan province of Afghanistan who believed that the solution to the internal divisions in Afghanistan was in a federal system of governance, with each ethnic group having specific constitutional rights and able to govern their own land and people. He was allegedly tortured and murdered by the Taliban in 1995, and posthumously given the title ‘Martyr Of National Unity’ in 2016 by Ashraf Ghani government. He supported equal representation of all ethnic groups of Afghanistan, especially Hazaras, who are still being persecuted in Afghanistan.

Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, Latinized as Albumasar, was an early Persian Muslim astrologer, thought to be the greatest astrologer of the Abbasid court in Baghdad. While he was not a major innovator, his practical manuals for training astrologers profoundly influenced Muslim intellectual history and, through translations, that of western Europe and Byzantium.

Abu Zayd Ahmed ibn Sahl Balkhi was a Persian Muslim polymath: a geographer, mathematician, physician, psychologist and scientist. Born in 850 CE in Shamistiyan, in the province of Balkh, Khorasan, he was a disciple of al-Kindi. He was also the founder the "Balkhī school" of terrestrial mapping in Baghdad.