Asad Khan

Asad Khan (1626/1631 – 15 June 1716), born Muhammad Ibrahim, was a Mughal noble and the wazir of Emperor Aurangzeb from 1676 to 1707 ^{1 2}. The sources divide on his birth year — about 1626 in Satish Chandra's account, about 1631 in William Irvine's — and the record carries both ¹. He came of a prestigious family of Safavid Iran: his grandfather Zulfiqar Khan had been beglar begi of Shirvan under Shah Abbas I, and his father, Zulfiqar Khan Qaramanlu, migrated to India late in Jahangir's reign ¹.

Asad Khan entered imperial service in 1654, served as second bakhshi until 1670 and as deputy wazir until 1676, when he became wazir himself ¹. From the 1680s he and his son Zulfiqar Khan led one of the two factions into which Aurangzeb's nobility divided ¹. In the Deccan he secured the supply lines for his son's siege of Jinji, and in 1691 he and Zulfiqar Khan arrested the prince Kam Bakhsh for opening unauthorised negotiations with the enemy — an act Aurangzeb threatened, but never carried out, to punish by removing him ¹.

Asad Khan backed Azam Shah in the succession struggle and lost; Bahadur Shah ended his wazirate in 1707 but raised him to Vakil-i-Mutlaq, a dignity unused since Shah Jahan's reign, with the title Asaf-ud-Daula ^{1 2}. Under Jahandar Shah he also held the governorship of Gujarat in absentia; when that emperor fell in 1713 and took refuge in his house, Asad Khan and his son handed him over to Farrukhsiyar, who nevertheless had Zulfiqar Khan killed ¹. Asad Khan spent his remaining years in obscurity and died on 15 June 1716 ^{1 3}. No text read names a school for him — an infobox filing in one article is not a text — and his faith is recorded as unknown ².