In the mid 2010s Imran Khan was at a low ebb. He had been a household name in Pakistan ever since he led the country’s cricket team to victory in the 1992 World Cup. But as he entered his 60s, the fame, glamour and parties which followed left him feeling unfulfilled. Khan wanted to make his mark in politics.

He’d had opportunities. Hoping to exploit his celebrity, the main political parties courted him in the early 1990s but, considering them corrupt, he spurned them. Instead he founded his own party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice, or PTI), pledging to clean up politics. Historically, Pakistan has been dominated by two political parties, each tied to a powerful family. Running for his own party meant years in the wilderness, struggling to be taken seriously. When Khan sat down with journalists to discuss the condition of Pakistan they only wanted to talk about cricket, or his latest girlfriend.

For a moment it had looked like Khan was starting to get somewhere. In 2014 he led protests against Nawaz Sharif, the recently elected prime minister, whom Khan accused of having won the premiership through a rigged vote. The fact that these demonstrations were allowed to take place in the centre of Islamabad caused some to speculate that the army, the de-facto power behind Pakistan’s superficially democratic politics, was interested in a change of government. But things fizzled out.

Khan tried again in 2016 after a cache of leaked documents known as the Panama Papers seemed to implicate Sharif’s children in corruption (they were later charged and eventually acquitted). The former cricketer corralled protesters in Peshawar, but a promised march on the capital never happened. Pakistan’s political gossips wondered if Khan’s moment had passed.

Home life offered no consolation. He had separated from his second wife, Reham Khan, a former BBC weather presenter, after their relations deteriorated to the point where they could barely be in the same room (he later described the relationship as his biggest mistake). Then Khan came into contact with someone who would profoundly change his life, offering him both spiritual guidance and the promise of worldly success.