In historian Pavel Chobanyan's view, the story of Shahnazar's murder of his brother and usurpation of the throne was invented by Muslim historians such as Mirza Jamal Javanshir and Mirza Adigozal Bey, who were seeking to affirm the hereditary rights of the khans of Karabakh and their descendants and discredit those of the Melik-Shahnazarians before the Russian authorities; later, this story was adopted and repeated by Armenian authors.
Raffi writes that Shahnazar "adopted in his private life the polygamous customs of the Persians", whereby he "greatly shocked and revolted the religious feelings of the people, and incurred the hatred of all the other Meliks".
[19] The Indo-Armenian traveler Joseph Emin, who visited Karabakh in the 18th century, reports that the wife of Mirza Khan (an ally of Shahnazar) described Shahnazar as "a true friend of Panah [Ali Khan], a learned man in the Persian language, and the establisher of the Mahomedans in our mountains [of Karabakh]: he was a son of Belzabub, nor worthy of the name of a Christian.
"[20] According to Bishop Makar Barkhudaryants, although Shahnazar regretted his actions in the last years of his life, the Armenians of Karabakh did not forgive him, slamming him in their folk stories with satire via Pele Pughi's character, which depicted the latter as the melik's disobedient jester who constantly provokes the ruler to do silly things, so that he would remain on the right path out of fear of finding himself in laughable situations.
Jumshud and Lisanevich caught and killed Ibrahim Khan while he was on his way to join Persian prince Abbas Mirza's camp at Shosh village.
[7] Karen Shakhnazarov, a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, producer and screenwriter, is one of several living descendants of the Melik-Shahnazarian princely family.