Ali Mardan Khan

Ali Mardan Khan (died 1657) was a Kurdish military leader and administrator of the Zig tribe, son of the Safavid official Ganj Ali Khan ^{1 2}. He governed Kandahar for the Safavid shahs before surrendering the city to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1638, and rose to the highest rank of the Mughal nobility ¹. The sources divide on the day of his death — 2 April 1657 in the English and Arabic articles, 26 April 1657 in the Urdu article — and the record preserves both ^{1 3}.

In 1624 Ali Mardan inherited his father's posts as governor of Kerman, Sistan and Kandahar under Shah Abbas I, ruling from Kandahar ^{1 2}. From 1632 he corresponded with the Mughal court, fearing assassination by Shah Safi, and in March 1638 he surrendered his territories, including Kandahar, to Shah Jahan ¹. The handover was applauded in Mughal chronicles and condemned in Safavid ones ². In Mughal service his rise was rapid: by 1643 he held a rank of 7000 zat and 7000 sowar and the title Amir al-Umara, and he governed in turn Kashmir, the Punjab and finally Kabul, which he held until his death ¹.

Ali Mardan Khan was a notable architectural patron. As a Safavid official he built the cistern of the Ganj Ali Khan complex at Kerman and gardens at Kandahar ¹. His most famous Mughal work was the canal that brought water from the Ravi to the suburbs of Lahore over a distance of more than a hundred miles, which made possible the Shalimar Bagh; he also built the Chashma Shahi garden at Srinagar, an Iranian-style covered bazaar at Peshawar that Shah Jahan admired enough to copy in his new capital, and works at Kabul ^{1 2}. He died in the pandemic of 1657, and his son Ibrahim brought his body to Lahore, where he was buried in the tomb of his mother ².

One scholarly characterization names Ali Mardan Khan a Shia: the survey of Shia Islam in South Asia, citing S. A. A. Rizvi's history of the Twelver Shi'is of India, calls him the most influential Shia of Shah Jahan's era and records his caravanserai in Kashmir named for the twelve Shia Imams ⁴. Because that naming rests on a single source family, his faith is recorded as unknown and flagged for a founder ruling, as his record sets out ¹.