Advice for the Sultan : Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in Medieval Islam

by Yavari, Neguin

• ISBN13: 9780231704106
• ISBN10: 0231704100
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-30
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Neguin Yavari revisits conflicting currents in Muslim political thought from the middle ages to the present, reassessing their significance and their relationship to modern history and dominant Western and Islamic narratives. Yavari bases her study on close readings of Islamic mirrors, a form of elite literature written by learned men providing advice on ethics and statecraft for statesmen and rulers. Contemporary scholars often dismiss mirrors as unreliable texts for analysis, yet when placed within a comparative framework, they reveal fascinating trends in elite political thought. Medieval Islamic mirrors promote secular values, such as reason and moderation, as the most effective safeguards against political instability and divine rebuke. Though they often evoke the wrath of God to convince kings to adopt their ways, mirrors provide an opening for the taming of Fortune and the neutralization of accident, chance, and luck. The mirrors Yavari studies range from the ancient Egyptian The Duties of the Vizier and the pre-Islamic Iranian Letter of Tansar to the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum. They include several Islamic mirrors from the tenth and eleventh centuries and those of Hoccleve, Gower, and Lydgate. These texts demonstrate the multiple ways history and context are embedded within a text, and they prove the place of Islamic political thought within the discipline of intellectual history. How can we write about the history of political thought when the end-product is not seen as the march of a manifest destiny, a progressive secularization, or the promotion of liberal values? Is it possible to read texts for context if their values do not take hold within a society, and is it possible to study texts that produced political communities so radically different from those that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Yavari confronts these questions and more in her unparalleled study of these neglected political works.