Sublime

Aurangzeb reneged on his promise and secretly had Murad arrested. After three years in prison the Prince was accused of murder and sentenced to death. He died at the age of 37, on the 14th December 1661.

Throughout the autumn and the early part of the winter of 1857, while the battle for Lucknow still raged in the eastern half of Hindustan, much of the effort of British administration in Delhi went into preparing for the historic trial of the man who was now clearly going to be the last of the Mughals.

These were the jihadis of the underground mujahedin network, whose brotherhood, bound to fight the jihad by oaths of allegiance (or bayat) to a leader (or amir), now cast off their veil of secrecy and began to mass in Delhi, ready for the holy war they had so long dreamt of.*43 Before long the jihadis would become a significant force in the Delhi

When asked for a decision, Shah Soltan Hosein would tend to agree with whoever approached him last – usually with the words Yakhshi dir (‘It is good’ in the Turkic court language).

Did he do a deal with Nader? We will probably never know. The Nezam does seem to have been given an easier ride in the collection of tribute than the other great nobles; Nader’s warning to Mohammad Shah about the Nezam before he left could have been a dark joke, a double bluff.

Some accounts say that the Nezam ol-Molk and Sa’adat Khan directly invited Nader to invade, and in later years the story that the Nezam in particular had betrayed his master, was widespread.

It was, all in all, a very odd sort of religious war, where a Muslim Emperor was pushed into rebellion against his Christian oppressors by a mutinous army of overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, who came to him of their own free will (and initially against his) to ask for the barakat of a Muslim blessing and the leadership of the Mughal they regarded as

For the Shi‘ah, the Muharram rituals signify a moral choice; they are a public statement that, in the words of one participant, “if we had been there at Karbala we would have stood with [Husayn] and shed our blood and died with him.” Perhaps equally important, these rituals serve as an act of proselytizing. As another participant explained to David

Before he set off to Hyderabad, Shore had briefed William Kirkpatrick to stick to the existing Triple Alliance, signed four years earlier in 1790, which bound the Marathas,