Adil or Adel Shah Afshar, born ʿAlī-qolī Khan was the Afsharid Shah of Iran from 1747 to 1748, a nephew and successor of Nader Shah, the founder of the Afsharid dynasty.
Background
Ali-qoli khan was the eldest son of Nader"s brother, Ebrahim Khan. In the same year he married Princess Ketevan, daughter of the Georgian king Teimuraz II, Nader"s ally. In 1740 he was also married to a daughter of Abu"l-Fayz, ruler of the recently subdued Bokhara.
Career
Nader appointed him governor of Mashad in 1737. In April 1747, in conjunction with the rebels of Sistan, Ali-qoli khan occupied Herat and induced the Kurds to enter into a rebellion. Nader, while marching against the insurgents, was murdered by a group of his officers, who then offered the crown to Ali-qoli.
On arriving at Mashad, Ali-qoli sent a loyal force to the fortress of Kalat, where they killed all of Nader"s issue with the exception of his 14-year-old grandson Shahrukh.
On 6 July 1747, he was declared the shah under the name of Adel-Shah, "the just king". Later that year, he defeated his erstwhile Kurdish allies, who had refused to supply grain for his famine-stricken army and capital, and had several of his supporters put to death on suspicion of conspiracy.
He then marched against Mazandaran in a futile attempt to bend the Qajar tribe into submission. The Qajar chief Mohammad Hasan Khan was killed and his four-year-old son, the future Agha Mohammad Khan, was castrated on Adil"s orders.
He murdered Adil"s favourite Sohrab Khan and in, June 1748, he marched to join his forces with Amir Aslan Khan, the sardar of Azerbaijan against Adil.
The latter, at the head of a numerically superior army, advanced from Gilan to prevent the rebel forces combining, but the defection of many of his commanders precipitated his complete defeat. Adil fled to Tehran, but a local governor surrendered Adil to Ebrahim, who had him blinded. Six months later, Ebrahim was proclaimed shah, but his reign was quickly terminated by a coup which brought Nadir"s surviving grandson Shahrukh to the throne.
Ebrahim was blinded and soon died, while Adel was sent in chains to Mashad, where he was tortured to death.