Karim Beg belonged to the Zand tribe, a small and little-known tribe of Laks, a branch of Lurs who may have been originally Kurdish. The Zands were concentrated on the villages of Pari and Kamazan in the Malayer district, but were also found roaming in the central Zagros ranges and the countryside of Hamadan. Karim Beg was born in ca. 1705 in the village of Pari, then part of the Safavid Empire. He was the eldest son of a certain Inaq Khan Zand, and had 3 sisters, a brother named Mohammad Sadeq Khan, and two half-brothers named Zaki Khan and Eskandar Khan Zand. In 1722, the Safavid Empire was on the verge of collapsing—Isfahan and most of central and east Iran had been seized by the Afghan Hotak dynasty, while the Russians had conquered many cities in northern Iran. Around the same time, the Ottoman Empire took advantage of Iran's decadence to conquer a large number of western frontier districts. There they faced bold opposition from the local clans, including the Zands, who under the chief Mehdi Khan Zand harassed their forces and stopped them from advancing further into Iran.