Five of the most controversial positions of Imran Khan

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan election winner, Imran Khan, has not hesitated to adopt inflammatory rhetoric during his 22 years of politics. AFP chooses five of its most controversial positions:

The former cricket captain of Pakistan is considered to be something liberal in the West, especially in Britain where the press remembers his high-flying lifestyle and his marriage to Jemima Goldsmith.

But Khan aroused indignation in January when he called feminism a "Western concept," claiming in an interview that he had "degraded the role of mother."

Critics have accused him of procuring his conservative voting base.

Khan was accused of incorporating extremism by launching a full defense of Pakistan's controversial blasphemy laws, which provide for a maximum death sentence.

A few weeks before the election, Khan told the clerics, in television commentary, that his Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in Pakistan was "fully supporting" the blasphemy law "and will defend it" .

"No Muslim can call himself a Muslim unless he believes that the Prophet Muhammad is the last prophet," he said, alarming the Ahmadi sect, persecuted for its belief in a prophet after Muhammad.

The ex cricket player got the nickname "Taliban Khan" for his peace negotiations with militants and for his party's alliance with Sami ul Haq, the so-called father of the Taliban whose madrbadas educated Mullah Omar and the Taliban. Jalaluddin Haqqani.

In 2013, Khan even suggested that the Pakistani Taliban be allowed to open an office in the country.

The previous year, he had been criticized for his lukewarm condemnation of the shooting of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who became a women's rights activist and Nobel laureate.

Khan, 65, violently reprimanded the US drone strikes on Pakistani territory, angering the biggest benefactor of the South Asian country.

He claimed that the strikes killed innocent civilians, which the US government denies.

In 2012, he was briefly removed from an international flight between Canada and New York and questioned by US immigration officials about his views about the strikes.

Khan was elected largely on an anti-corruption bill – he described corruption as a "security risk" for Pakistan.

But he complained of having hosted party politicians whom he had accused of being corrupt in PTI before the elections.

In April, Khan announced that he would return 20 PTI lawmakers to an anti-corruption body after being accused of selling votes in senatorial elections.