Burhan Nizam Shah I
Burhan Nizam Shah I inherited Ahmadnagar at seven, ruled it for forty-three years, and made it Shia, which is the decision of his the Deccan remembered. He was the son of Malik Ahmad, the Bahmani governor who had founded the state and the city in 1490. When his father died in 1510 the regency went to a Deccani noble named Mukammal Khan, who governed until the boy was old enough to remove him. The state he took over was the middle one of five, and its whole foreign policy was the quarrel over the Bahmani inheritance with Bijapur to the south and Berar to the east. He fought Ismail Adil Shah of Bijapur through the 1520s and then married his sister, which closed that front for a generation and gave the two houses a reason to stand together against Vijayanagara. The conversion came in 1537, under the influence of a Persian theologian, Shah Tahir, who had arrived at the court as a refugee from the Safavids and became its most influential man. The state religion became Twelver Shia, the Friday sermon was read in the name of the twelve imams, and Ahmadnagar's relations with Shia Persia and Shia Bijapur were fixed. He fought the last of the Bahmani sultans at Bidar, took Sholapur from Bijapur and lost it again, and spent the 1540s in the wars of all five sultanates against each other that the Portuguese at Goa watched with interest and sold horses into. He died in 1553 and was buried near the shrine of the Shia saint Shah Chiragh. His son Hussain built the coalition that destroyed Vijayanagara twelve years later, and his granddaughter Chand Bibi held the city against the Mughals. The tomb, the Bagh Rauza, is in Ahmadnagar still.
- Lived: 1503 CE – 1553 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: sultan, head_of_state
