Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan

Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan (5 November 1914 – 14 October 1973), titled the Raja of Mahmudabad, was an Indian nobleman, politician, writer and poet who moved from opposing the partition of India to a leading place in the Pakistan Movement. ^{1 2} The English article and Wikidata spell his name "Ahmed"; the lane queue spells it "Ahmad", and both spellings are carried in his record. ¹

He inherited the Mahmudabad estate in 1931 on the death of his father, Maharaja Mohammad Ali Mohammad Khan, while still a minor; a trust administered the estate, with Mohammad Ali Jinnah becoming the dominant personality on its board. ¹ From 1940 to 1944 he served as managing trustee of the Madrasatul Waizeen in Lucknow, the centre of Shia Islamic education his father had founded. ¹ He carried on the family literary tradition, composing ruba'iyat, salaams, marsiya, ghazals and nazms in Urdu and Persian under the pen names Bahr and Mahbub. ¹

In 1937, one of the youngest members of the Muslim League's Working Committee, he founded the All India Muslim Students Federation. ¹ He at first opposed partition and presided over the All-India Jamhur Muslim League (1940), formed to counter the two-nation theory; after the Lahore Resolution of 1940, under Jinnah's influence, he came to support a separate Muslim state and mobilised the Students Federation for the Pakistan Movement, also financing the League's Dawn newspaper. ¹ The article records his later disillusion: his vision of Pakistan was, in its words, an Islamic welfare state, and he was disheartened by the course the country took. ¹

In 1945, before Partition, he migrated to Iraq, moved to Pakistan in 1957 — donating the future income of his inherited lands to the Pakistani state — and later settled in London. ¹ In London he was the first director of the Islamic Cultural Centre and devoted himself to the building of the Regent's Park Mosque, and the article credits him as a moving force behind the World of Islam Festival held in Britain in 1976, three years after his death. ¹

He died in London on 14 October 1973 and was buried in Mashhad, Iran, near the Imam Reza shrine. ¹ After his death the Government of India took over his Indian estate under the Enemy Property Act; his widow Rani Kaniz Abid and his son and successor Raja Mohammad Amir Mohammad Khan fought its recovery through the courts, winning a Supreme Court judgment in 2005 whose implementation, the article reports, remained blocked. ¹ The Mahmudabad neighbourhood of Karachi is named after him, and Pakistan Post honoured him in its Pioneers of Freedom series in 1990. ¹