The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Mirrors for Princes

The term “Mirrors for Princes,” following European practice, is given to works of literature that impart advice to rulers and high-ranking administrators; such writings are abundant in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. The designaton “Mirrors for Princes” has often been used as a synonym for the more general category of advice literature and applied to a variety of written texts as long as they serve an advisory purpose and address a royal recipient; in this sense, the term has been applied to works of ḥikma (wisdom), maw‘iẓa (moral exhortation), akhlāq (ethics, characteristically in the personal, domestic, and political settings), and waṣiyya (“testament,” usually of a father to his son[s] and successor[s]). In other usages, the term “Mirrors for Princes” has been restricted to a particular literary genre, understood as a branch of adab (belles lettres). According to this more limited definition, the designation is usually reserved for independent book-length works (sometimes known as adab or ādāb al-mulūk [“the manners of kings”], naṣīḥat al-mulūk [“counsel for kings”], or siyar al-mulūk [“the conduct of kings”]) subdivided into thematic chapters or sections, in which materials from varied sources (such as Qur’anic verses, hadith, proverbs, bons mots, poetry, anecdotes, historical narratives) feature prominently. Whether the broader or the more restrictive definition is taken, the author’s choice of a distinct literary form played a major role in shaping his work and its reception.

Advisory works were among the compositions that facilitated the accommodation of late antique political-cultural ideas and ideals, and their literary expressions, into the medium of Arabic and later Persian. They incorporated and adapted materials that dealt in significant measure with matters pertaining to (or considered relevant to) courts and courtiers, drawn from texts such as the pseudo-Aristotelian Sirr al-Asrar (known in the Latin West under the title Secretum secretorum, or Secret of Secrets), the romance of Alexander, and the collection of animal fables titled Kalila and Dimna, all of which circulated in several languages and versions in the Mediterranean and West Asian regions in the late antique and early Islamic periods. In the context of later Muslim-majority societies, the best-known examples of Mirrors for Princes are a trio of celebrated late-11th-century works written in Persian in the shadow of the rise of the Seljuqs or during their rule in Iran: the Qabusnama (Book of Qabus) of Kay Ka’us, the Nasihat al-Muluk (Counsel for kings) of Ghazali, and the Siyar al-Muluk (Conduct of kings) or Siyasatnama (Book of governance) of the vizier Nizam al-Mulk. It is perhaps on account of the lasting popularity and familiarity of these highly individual works that Mirrors for Princes have sometimes been associated particularly with the Persian language and with “Iranian” political-cultural ideas. While the Persian language has indeed produced a remarkably rich moralizing literature, these associations should not be overstated: the Mirrors for Princes literature, richly represented in Arabic and Turkish as well as Persian, is extremely varied, and the meanings and significance of particular ideas and motifs, even where they can be traced to “translations” from Pahlavi or Greek, were shaped according to the exigencies of the specific environments in which they were articulated.

Modern scholarship has firmly established the importance of Mirrors for Princes in the context of medieval political thought, the category of which, otherwise construed so as to assign a preponderant role to juristic sources, has been greatly enriched by attention to the literature of the courts. Like their counterparts writing in Latin and the European vernacular languages, the authors of Arabic and Persian Mirrors for Princes did not necessarily, or even frequently, set out to expound a comprehensive political vision. At first glance, Mirrors for Princes often appear to be somewhat conventional in that certain themes (justice and injustice, the virtues of patience and clemency, the importance of consultation and heeding good advice, the need for the king to refrain from making hasty judgments, and so on) as well as certain sayings, citations, and formulae (such as the “circle of justice”) recur with marked regularity. Despite these common elements, the Mirrors for Princes literature cannot be said to represent a remotely uniform outlook, style, or mode of expression. The form has proven highly flexible and has been employed to accommodate a wide range of authorial purposes and dispositions. From the 12th century onward, it becomes possible to identify a number of variants: some Mirrors for Princes emphasized matters of administration, some concentrated on the ruler’s cultivation of personal virtue, some were encyclopedic in scope, some were homiletic, and some combined several approaches and tones appropriate to particular sections of the book. These choices depended on, among other factors, the background, professional training, and occupation of the author; the period and region in which he lived; the specific circumstances under which he wrote; the language he decided to use; and the interests of his royal patron. An author’s reasons for writing might include the consolidation of ties with particular members of the courtly elite, aspirations for professional advancement, and a desire to instruct and entertain. What is clear is that every author wrote under and in response to specific conditions, political and otherwise; indeed, several Mirrors for Princes may be regarded as occasional in character.

A number of scholars, among them Cornell Fleischer and Julie Scott Meisami, have explored the meanings of the ideas and materials relayed in Mirrors for Princes when applied to the particular historical contexts in and for which they were written. If portions of the materials that appear in Mirrors for Princes can often be traced through a large number of earlier texts, their deployment in any given literary context carries its own significance. Situated in its full historical context, a book of counsel may convey a particular vein of commentary on, and criticism of, prevailing political and cultural trends; it may also represent the participation in political discourse of a specific group or faction in response to contemporary conditions and circumstances.

Recent scholarship has placed importance on the literary strategies pursued by authors of Mirrors for Princes in response to the constraints imposed by the relationship between counselor-writer and ruler-addressee. To read Mirrors for Princes in the light of the author’s dependence on the recipient provides a necessary perspective, and, although relations between counselors and kings were sometimes quite complicated, it is important to acknowledge the effects of the differential in power. Following the conventions of the literary genre decreased the risks involved in offering advice to the ruler. In addition to addressing an established repertoire of themes and adducing expected quotations from recognized authorities, authors sometimes cast their advice in the framework of paradigmatic embodiments of the wise sage and receptive monarch, such as Aristotle and Alexander or Buzurgmihr and Anushirvan: figures distant in time and context from the author and his addressee. Such techniques allowed the writer to present himself as an intermediary rather than a direct critic.

See also Nizam al-Mulk (1018–92)