Mahabat Khan II

Mahabat Khan II (d. 2 January 1675), born Mirza Luhrasp and known in his early career as Luhrasp Khan, was a Mughal noble under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb ¹. He was the second son of Zamana Beg, titled Mahabat Khan — the general who seized Jahangir in 1626 and died in 1634, whose record on the museum stands separately — and he inherited his father's title in 1652 ^{1 2}. The harvest queue's dates for him, 1610–1678, are not supported by the sources: no birth date is attested, and he died in 1675 ¹.

Luhrasp began in his father's campaigns, serving at the siege of Daulatabad in 1633, received the honorific Khan in 1637, defended Kandahar in 1642 and campaigned in Balkh in 1646 ¹. In February 1651 he was appointed mir bakhshi, head of the empire's military administration and its second most powerful official ¹. He governed Kabul — briefly in 1650, officially from 1651 to 1655 alongside Dara Shikoh, and again in the later 1650s — and fought in the second and third Mughal sieges of Kandahar ¹.

Aurangzeb made him governor of Gujarat in 1662, where he served six years, and sent him back to Kabul in 1669 against the Pashtun rising, though his diplomacy with his old protégé Khushal Khan Khattak achieved little and he was replaced in 1670 ¹. He was outspoken: in a letter to the emperor he criticised the increased power Aurangzeb had given the Islamic judges and the weight placed on theologians' opinions in political matters ¹. Scholars have attributed the construction of Peshawar's Mahabat Khan Mosque to him, on verbal tradition and his long presence in the region, though its date is unclear ¹. He died on 2 January 1675 in the Punjab ^{1 2}.