Amir Khan

Amir Iqbal Khan is a British former professional boxer, born in Bolton on 8 December 1986 to a Pakistani Punjabi Rajput family with roots in Matore village, Kahuta, in Punjab.¹² He won silver at the 2004 Athens Olympics at seventeen, held world titles at light-welterweight, and retired in 2022 with a record of 34 wins and 6 losses.¹ This record is the boxer's (born 1986), not that of Aamir Khan the Indian actor (born 1965), who has a separate record in the museum.

Khan was born and raised in Bolton, educated at Smithills School and Bolton Community College, and began boxing competitively at eleven; his amateur honours included three English school titles, gold at the 2003 Junior Olympics and a world junior title in South Korea in 2004, in an amateur career of 101 wins and 9 losses.¹ At the Athens Olympics of 2004 he reached the lightweight final and lost to Cuba's Mario Kindelán, becoming Britain's youngest Olympic boxing medallist at seventeen.¹ He turned professional in 2005, won the Commonwealth lightweight title in 2007, and in 2009 took the WBA light-welterweight title from Andriy Kotelnyk.¹³ In 2011 he unified his title with the IBF belt by beating Zab Judah, then lost his titles to Lamont Peterson and Danny García.¹ In 2016 he moved up to middleweight to challenge Canelo Álvarez for the WBC title and was knocked out.¹ He announced his retirement on 13 May 2022 after seventeen years as a professional, saying it was time to hang up his gloves and thanking his teams, family and fans.¹ Outside the ring he founded the Amir Khan Foundation, owns Khan Promotions and the Amir Khan Academy in Pakistan, and has appeared in reality television shows.¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum. The English article states that Khan is a Muslim and "a member of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order", and an active supporter of the Muslim Writers Awards.¹ However, the only two citations behind the order-membership claim, as checked in the article's wikitext, are a Facebook post by a community page within the order's circles, titled "Boxer Amir Khan Gets Bayah With Pir...", and a tweet: a single source family from inside the order's community, not two independent attestations, and the claim's many web copies all repeat this article.¹ The Arabic article presents Islam as part of his identity: it recalls his Hajj and the equality of people there, his statement that he observes his religion's teachings and neither drinks alcohol nor smokes, and his call, in an Observer interview, for British Muslims to confront extremism.³ The Urdu article makes no statement of his religion.⁴ Wikidata gives his religion as Islam, generically, with no references and no school named.² Because no source names a legal school for him, and the order-membership claim does not rest on two independent attestations, his school is recorded in the museum's data as unknown, under the doubt rule.¹³² In 2023 UK Anti-Doping imposed a two-year backdated ban after ostarine was found in his sample; he maintained the ingestion was unintentional, and the independent tribunal concluded his conduct was neither deliberate nor reckless.¹

• Amir Khan — English Wikipedia¹
• Amir Khan — Arabic Wikipedia³
• Amir Khan — Urdu Wikipedia⁴
• Amir Khan — Wikidata Q469870²