Asaf Jahi dynasty
Muslim dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Hyderabad from 1734 to 1948

The Asaf Jahi is a Muslim dynasty that ruled the Hyderabad State. The family came to India in the late 17th century and became employees of the Mughal Empire. They were great patrons of Indo-Persian culture, language, and literature, and the family found ready patronage.
The dynasty was founded by Mir Qamar-ud-Din Siddiqi, a Viceroy of the Deccan—(administrator of six Mughal governorates) under the Mughal emperors from 1713 to 1721. He intermittently ruled after Aurangzeb's death in 1707 and under the title Asaf Jah in 1724. The Mughal Empire crumbled and the Viceroy of the Deccan, Asaf Jah I, declared himself independent, whose domain extended from the Narmada River in the North to Trichinopoly in the South and Masulipatnam in the east to Bijapur in the west.
History
Nawab Khwaja Abid Siddiqi, the grandfather of the first Nizam, was born in Aliabad near Samarkand in the kingdom of Bukhara in modern-day Uzbekistan. His father, Alam Shaik, was a well-known Sufi and celebrated man of letters. Khwaja Abid's mother was from the family of Mir Hamdan, a distinguished Syed of Samarkhand. The first Nizam's mother was the daughter of Sadullah Khan, the Grand vizier (1645-1656) of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Asaf Jahi dynasty” as muslim dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Hyderabad from 1734 to 1948. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as muslim dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Hyderabad from 1734 to 1948. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16962165. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1713, 1721, 1707 and 1724.
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This entry incorporates text from “Asaf Jahi dynasty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.