4
Perso-Islamicate Political Ethic in Relation to the Sources of Islamic Law
SAÏD AMIR ARJOMAND
THERE IS AN ALARMING TENDENCY in the conventional wisdom to identify what is “Islamic” in the Persianate, and more generally the Islamicate,1 culture and civilization by deriving it from Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This practice is true for what is usually called Islamic political thought but should more accurately be considered Perso-Islamicate political ethic and public law. For centuries, the readings for moral education in Iran began with Kalilah wa Demnah and the Golestan of Sa‘di, and this continued to be the case after the educational reforms and the establishment of the modern national schools under Reza Shah in the 1920s. Excerpts from these books were accordingly included in literature textbooks for the new high schools, as were selections from the Four Essays (Chahar maqalah) of the Seljuq secretary, Nizami Arudi Samarqandi. Anyone who read the fiqh books in Arabic would not have expected to find a section on Islamic government for his or her moral education; even if they had intentionally sought such a section, they would not have found one.
I began my academic career by rejecting a thesis on the allegedly inescapable illegitimacy of the state in Twelver Shi‘ism as elaborated by A. K. S. Lambton and Hamid Algar and affirmed by Nikki Keddie (Arjomand 1979). It did not occur to me at the time that some Orientalists also came close to considering all historical and actual states “un-Islamic” and virtually illegitimate in Sunni Islam as well. The Abbasid accusation against the Umayyads that they had degenerated the caliphate into kingship (mulk) was implicitly or explicitly taken to have essentialist, transhistorical reality, ignoring not only the ruler’s regular titles (malik, sultan, shah) but also the lavish overlay of such imperial titles as padshah, shahanshah, khaqan, and finally khalifah. Only the idealized picture of the caliphate was considered “Islamic” and therefore truly legitimate. The implication of this view is that not only the subjects of the Safavids but also those of the Mughals and the Ottomans—and just about any Muslim government in the preceding half-millennium—considered them illegitimate! Such flight from history and sociology was made possible by the Orientalist privileging of a narrow genre of “Islamic” juristic writing that was completely marginal to the fiqh corpus itself, not to mention the literature on ethics, evident most notably in H. A. R. Gibb’s 1955 essay on “constitutional organization,” and following him, A. K. S. Lambton (1981). More recently, Patricia Crone (2004a), the erstwhile Orientalist enfant terrible, decided to mark her return to the fold by introducing an element of diversity into Islamic political theory of “God’s government.” She has done so by extending Gibb’s privileged body of texts, which she considers Sunni “constitutional law,” by adding “sectarian” doctrines of the imamate as their presumed counterparts, that is, as statements of theories of government. The result has been a completely distorted and ahistorical picture of the political ethic and public law of the Muslim world in this new thesis of the inescapably un-Islamic character of all Muslim governments. The situation is exacerbated by the discovery of the same marginal genre, namely the al-Ahkam al-sultaniyah and a small number of works on al-Siyasah al-shar‘iyah2 by the contemporary Islamists who consider secular governments illegitimate.3
I have tried to show in my own work of the last few years on this subject that the idea and normative principles of monarchy were elaborated on in the literature of ethics and statecraft—called advice literature in Louise Marlow’s chapter in the present volume—and they were fully integrated into Islam by the time of the development of the ethicolegal order based on the shari‘a around the tenth century CE. Of the two normative systems, monarchy and the ethicolegal order, monarchy developed faster by absorbing the Persian political tradition. The idea was firmly established that God had chosen two classes of mankind above the rest, the prophets to guide mankind to salvation and the kings to preserve order as the prerequisite for the pursuit of salvation. This idea allowed for the legal pluralism of the Islamic Empire. One could pursue salvation under a just ruler through the Islamic shari‘a or the Christian shari‘a, or the Jewish shari‘a, or those of the Zoroastrians, Sabians, and other honorary “peoples of the Book.” I have called this a “theory of the two powers,” with deliberately provocative intent (Arjomand 2003). I would readily admit that the institutional framework of Muslim polities did not show the same dualism, except much later and only in Iran with the emergence of an independent Shi‘ite hierocracy in the late eighteenth century. But this historical condition will not, I think, affect the particular argument I want to make in this chapter. Monarchy as temporal power rested on the fundamental conception of a circle of justice, which predated Islam, and reflected the dependence of the agrarian state on its taxpaying subjects and the corresponding need to deliver justice to them (Darling 2008).
Independent royal dynasties were established in Iran and in Egypt in the latter part of the ninth century. The Shi‘ite Buyids, who captured Baghdad in the mid-tenth century, became the first of a series of secular independent rulers to assume the title of sultan and, in Iran, shahanshah. The bifurcation of sovereignty into caliphate and sultanate was a dramatic expression of the autonomy of the political order in the form of monarchy from the caliphate (Bartold 1963). But this autonomy had in fact existed since the last quarter of the ninth century, that is, about the same time as the consolidation of the normative autonomy of the shari‘a. In other words, from the tenth century onward, the legal order of the caliphate had two normatively autonomous components: monarchy and the shari‘a. I have referred to these as the political order and the shar‘i order, respectively. This duality is reflected in the medieval literature on statecraft and kingship as a theory of the two powers: prophecy and kingship. This, I maintain, is the common framework within which geographical variations and inflections occur from India to Morocco.
The absorption of Perso-Indian political ideas is evident in the opening chapter (entitled the “Book of Sovereignty” [sultan]) of Uyun al-akhbar by Ibn Qutaybah al-Dinawari (d. 889–90), which reproduces many of the political aphorisms of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ and quotes very extensively from the Persian and Indian books on statecraft. Ibn Qutaybah devotes the afore-mentioned chapter to “the ruler, his sirah [manner, way], and his policy [siyasah]” (al-Dinawari 1986, 1:53). This is typical of the works on statecraft and customs of the ancient kings, which used the same normative vocabulary as the works of the early jurists, the two key words being sunna (custom or tradition) and sirah.4 With the eventual triumph of Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafi‘i and his school of law, these terms were exclusively appropriated for the Prophet. But the customs and the traditions of the ancient kings were given a similar normative status by the use of identical vocabulary. The title of “History of the Prophets and the Kings” (“Tarikh al-rusul wa’ l-muluk”) is attested several times, the most notable instance being the great universal history by Abu Ja‘far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari in the early tenth century. Abu Rayhan Biruni (1879, 108) mentions five early books on the Persian kings with the title of siyar al-muluk.
The theory of the two powers was a consequence of the reception of the Indo-Persian tradition of statecraft and political ethic. Before long, it was amplified by the selective reception of the Greek political science.5 In the great synthesis of these traditions as “eternal wisdom” (javidan khirad), Ibn Miskawayh (1952, 179) presented a key maxim of the Persianate political ethic as a tradition of the Prophet:
The ruler is the shadow of God on earth, with whom the oppressed among his creatures take refuge. If he rules with justice, for him is the reward and, upon the subjects [ri‘aya], gratitude. If he is oppressive, for him is the punishment, and upon the subjects, patience.
It is true that Ibn Miskawayh relativized the traditions of the Prophet by including them in “the Arab wisdom,” alongside the Persian, the Indian, and the Greek (Ibn Miskawayh 1952, 101–208). But he is exceptional in this respect, and others continued to privilege the words of God and His Prophet over the wisdom of the other nations and, thus, remain in line with their colleagues in Islamic jurisprudence. A key figure in the latter group, which sought to integrate the Greek wisdom into the theory of the two powers, is Abu al-Hasan al-Amiri (d. 991). He diverges from Farabi in differentiating prophecy and kingship, which, incidentally, allowed for a more harmonious reconciliation of Islam and philosophy. In the chapter on “the excellence of Islam in relation to kingship” in his Virtues of Islam (Kitab al-i‘lam bi-manaqib al-Islam) (1967, 152), al-Amiri backs his statement of the theory of two powers with verse 5:20 of the Qur’an: “Remember the favor [God] bestowed upon you when He made prophets appear among you, and made you kings.” He considers prophecy and kingship the two institutions fundamental for the preservation of the world: “There is no authority in learning and wisdom higher than prophecy. There is no higher authority in power and majesty than kingship. . . . It is related from Moses when addressing his people: ‘Remember the favor [God] bestowed upon you when He made prophets appear among you, and made you kings’” (Q.5:20).6
In this chapter I will examine the role, in the normative hermeneutic of Persianate political ethic, of the two scriptural sources it shares with Islamic law, namely the Qur’an and the hadith. My evidence will be drawn from two sources of medieval Persianate political ethic and public law: (1) books on ethics and statecraft written for the education of the princes and officials of their chanceries, and (2) actual and model royal decrees collected for the education and training of the bureaucratic class of secretaries and administrators. I think the model and actual decrees of the royal chanceries presented in the insha’ literature of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries are valuable additions to the works on statecraft and ethics.7 My main focus will therefore be on this literature in order to rectify the current misconceptions and paint a more accurate picture of the medieval Persianate political ethic and public law. But let me first turn to the literature on ethics and statecraft and examine Persian texts on the subject from the Seljuq and Il-Khanid period, the formative period of Persianate Islam.
Literature on Political Ethic and Statecraft
I have argued that the Indian concept of punishment (danda) was transmitted through Persian translations and became central to the Muslim conception of government, so much so that the same term siyasah came to mean “policy” as well as “punishment.” This transmission is evident in the collections of tales on statecraft from the mid-twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which I have cited elsewhere (Arjomand 2001), the most important being the translation of the above-mentioned Kalilah wa Demnah. In an elaborate preface on the theory of government to his amplified translation of this work, Nasr Allah Munshi (the scribe), an official of the late Qaznavid state, typically integrates the idea of punishment into the theory of kingship based on justice as a commentary on Qur’an 57:25: “Indeed, we sent our Messengers with clear signs, and We sent down with them the Book and the Balance so that men might uphold justice. And we sent down iron, wherein is great might, and many uses for men.” He affirms that the book, the scale, and the sword are brought into unity through the function of kingship because “the explanation of the laws [sharayi‘] is through the book, the passing of the gates of justice and equity through the scale, and the inspection and enforcement of the above through the sword. As it is established that the interests of religion are not observed without the majesty of the kings, and the putting out of the fire of rebellion is impossible without the dripping sword, the incumbency of obedience to the kings . . . becomes evident” (Nasr Allah Munshi 1998, 20). Nasr Allah Munshi follows this affirmation with the central maxim of Persian statecraft, which was also represented as “the circle of justice” and is attributed to the founder of the Sassanian Empire, Ardashir: “there is no kingdom except through men, and no men except through wealth, and no wealth except through cultivation [imara], and no cultivation except through justice and punishment [siyasah].” Munshi explains that wealth is the means for conquering the world, and justice and punishment are the elixir of wealth. Peace and security of roads and the preservation of the realm depend on punishment, hence, the priority of justice and punishment in the ethic of the kings (1998, 21). This is followed by another maxim, “religion and kingship are twin-born.” Once again, Munshi is careful to offer a synthesis of Islam and statecraft with a number of citations from the Qur’an, including “the authority verse” 4:59, and from the Traditions of the Prophet to prove that “the kings of Islam are the shadow of the Creator” (1998, 21).
In Makarim-i akhlaq, a book on ethics from the second half of the twelfth century, Razi al-Din Muhammad Nishaburi (d. 1201–2) alternates between the Qur’anic verses with their traditions of the Prophet and the Persian and Greek wisdom and the tradition of kings in their normative hermeneutics. His key chapter “On Justice and Its Opposite” (Nishaburi 1962, 125) begins with three Qur’anic verses, interspersed with two traditions of the Prophet: “I was born in the age of the just king, Anushirvan” and “Kingdom will remain with infidelity but not with tyranny!” A somewhat unusual feature of this work is the inclusion of the early Turkish figures among the exemplary kings. In fact, “the circle of justice” maxim is put in the mouth of a queen of Turkistan visiting the last Umayyad governor of Khurasan, Nasr b. Sayyar (Nishaburi 1962, 126), and an interesting implicit social contract is attributed to Afrasiyab: “I have not written this covenant explicitly, but whoever undertakes the covenant of kingship [bay‘at-i padshahi] . . . has made a covenant to obliterate injustice [jawr]” (Nishaburi 1962, 73).
In the second quarter of the thirteenth century, Nasir al-Din Tusi was much more systematic in ranking the scriptural and wisdom sources as the fundamentals of ethics. His Akhlaq-i Muhtashami is a collection of Qur’anic verses, traditions, and maxims from the wisdom literature arranged in order of priority in each of the forty topical chapters and translated into simple Persian. Some revealed verses are also integrated into the maxims of wisdom. An interesting example (Tusi 1960, 141) is Qur’an 57:25, and it is cited in exactly the same context as in the preface to Nasr Allah Munshi’s Kalilah wa Demnah: “The foundations of justice and policy [siyasah] are three: The law [namus], the ruler and the scale; or in other words, the pen and the book, the sword, and the scale. The divine book has confirmed this in His words, ‘Indeed, we sent our Messengers with clear signs, and We sent down with them the Book and the Balance so that men might uphold justice. And we sent down iron, wherein is great might and many uses for men’” (Q.57:25).
The “shadow of God” tradition is cited (Tusi 1960, 137) exactly as in Ibn Miskawayh, from whom a number of other traditions attributed to the Prophet were taken, with a variant cited as a maxim of the wisdom literature (Tusi 1960, 23). These variants are supplemented by the response of a Greek sage to Alexander: “When the subjects obey their king and the king exercises punishment/policy and justice, the kingdom will indeed stand firm and kingship be rectified” (1960, 400). None of these traditions and maxims, as is well known, allows the right to rebellion if the ruler deviates from justice and is tyrannical. “Oppression [zulm] is the darkness of the Day of Judgment; [and] there is no appeal from prayer of the oppressed” (1960, 136). Dire punishment may await the oppressive ruler in the other world, but in this world patience and prayer are the subjects’ only remedy. The Akhlaq-i Muhtashami is also very interesting for demonstrating, as does the reception of Tusi’s greater classic Akhlaq-i Nasiri, that there is absolutely no sectarian difference between the Shi‘ite and the Sunni conceptions of statecraft and political ethic. The normative hermeneutic is identical in both cases. As an Isma‘ili, Tusi simply extends the tradition of the Prophet with those of Alid imams and, at the lower level of normativity, with the wisdom of the Greeks and the Persians to include a few directives from the Fatimid caliphs and Isma‘ili missionaries.
The absence of sectarian difference is evident if we take a Sunni book on ethics from the late-Timurid period, which was similarly presented as a hadith collection and commentary, with frequent backing by Qur’anic verses. The chapter on monarchy begins with Qur’an 16:90 as the backing for the shadow of God hadith, with the word just added to the ruler, making “al-sultan al-adil” the shadow of God, which is followed by another famous hadith, “an hour of justice is better than sixty years of worship.” The author then moves on to other hadiths and then to political maxims, citing, among other things, Anushirvan’s testament to his son as versified by Sa‘di, including the maxim “the subjects are the root and the ruler the tree” (Kashifi Bayhaqi 1965, 240).
The author of a book on the vizierate to be discussed later tells us that he fled from strife and calamity in his beloved Isfahan to Fars, “the abode of justice [adlabad]” (Isfahani 1985, 22). He arrived there early in the long reign of Atabeg Sa‘d ibn Zangi, a half-century or more before Sa‘di dedicated Golestan to the same ruler (1258), a book on ethics that begins with the chapter “On the Tradition of Kings” (dar sirat-i padshahan) and aims, among other things, to “increase the eloquence of the secretaries [mutarassailan].” The Mongol devastation had intervened, making the prosperity and political stability of Fars and the just rule of Atabeg Sa‘d even more exceptional. Sa‘di typically calls his royal patron “the king of Islam” and praises him as “the lieutenant of Solomon’s kingdom and the helper of the people of Iran, the great shahanshah and the magnificent Atabeg, Abu Bakr Sa‘d ibn Zangi,” through whose justice God will protect the blessed territory of Shiraz until the end of time:
The land of Pars will fear no earthly injury
So long as upon its head is such shadow of God as thee.
Like earlier and less distinguished books on ethics, such as Makarim-i akhlaq, Sa‘di’s normative hermeneutics combines the Qur’anic verses and the traditions of the Prophet eclectically with the Persian and Greek wisdom and the tradition of kings, albeit with his distinctive and exceptional genius for highlighting the paradoxes and moral ambiguities in statecraft and political ethic.
Some of the most important works in the Persian literature on political ethic and statecraft, including Munshi’s Kalilah wa Demnah and the Jawami‘ al-hikayat of Sadid al-Din Muhammad Awfi, were produced at the courts of the later Ghaznavids and the Ghurids who succeeded them. This Perso-Islamicate political thought and ethic was disseminated by the sultans of Delhi in India in the thirteenth century. A key work in this transmission, the Adab al-harb wa al-shuja‘ah of Muhammad ibn Mansur Mubarakshah, written in the early decades of the thirteenth century in Lahore and dedicated to Sultan Iltutmesh of Delhi (d. 1235–36), merits special attention.
Mubarakshah’s preface contains a half-dozen Qur’anic verses and as many traditions of the Prophet, including Qur’an 57:25 on the book, the sword, and the scale (Mubarakshah 1967), which is reinforced later by a hadith to reemphasize the link between justice and punishment (Mubarakshah 1967, 15). But the tradition of the mythical Persian kings is also fundamentally normative and is reported especially to highlight the link between justice and economic/urban development (Mubarakshah 1967, 6–7, 12) and the institution of the social hierarchy (by Jamshid) (Mubarakshah 1967, 7–8). The “circle of justice” maxim is also duly attributed to Ardashir (Mubarakshah 1967, 120). The most important chapters on political ethic begin with a scriptural citation, preferably a revealed verse.
The distinctive feature of this work, however, is the integration of military organization and its normative regulation into statecraft: “As the reins of world-conquest [jahangiri] and rulership [saltanat] and military campaigns and punishment and justice and kindness are entrusted to kings, and such critical task cannot be ordered and rectified except through men and horse, the world-conqueror and army leader must know [the organization of] the army [lashkar] military organization and warfare” (Mubarakshah 1967, 19).
What is more remarkable is that here too supportive traditions abound, and traditional precedents are sought wherever possible in the practice of the early prophets, beginning with Adam (Mubarakshah 1967, 240).
Two-thirds of this book is in fact about the Prophet and the rightly guided commanders of the faithful, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali (Mubarakshah 1967, 265, 294–95, 336–38), while other nations and practices are also included. This ample reference to the practice of the Prophet and the rightly guided caliphs makes for the properly “Islamic” normative regulation of military action and organization. Of particular interest is the grounding of his chapter 8 on the horse in two traditions from the Prophet, followed by a very extensive one from Ali (Mubarakshah 1967, 176–77).8
The transmission of Perso-Islamicate political ethic to India continued beyond and after the Delhi sultanate into the Mughal Empire. The old historian and bureaucrat from Timurid Herat, Ghiyath al-Din Khwandamir, who had remained there to record the fall of its last Timurid ruler and the rise of the new Safavid dynasty in Iran, migrated to India, a year after it was conquered in 1527 by the Timurid Babur, and was received at his court. In Herat, he had composed a Dastur al-vuzara’ in 1500 (and updated it eight years later) and had abridged his great history, Habib al-siyar, under the significant title of Athar al-muluk wa al-anbiya’ (Traditions of kings and prophets) in 1525. He must have taken these works with him to India. More important, he composed a special book on the rule of statecraft for Babur’s successor, Humayun, which was appropriately entitled Qanun-i humayuni (also known as Humayun-namah). This work is particularly emphatic on the Qur’anic legitimation of monarchy and in resting the theory of the two powers firmly on the word of God. Khwandamir describes his last royal patron, Humayun, as the embodiment of the saying “the ruler is the shadow of God” (Khwandamir 1993, 272). After the death of Babur, “the messenger angel of the absolute ‘possessor of kingship’ [God] whispered the delightful call of ‘verily I have appointed thee a deputy [khalifah] upon the earth’ (Q.38:25) in the inner ear of the deserving king, . . . and clad this land-conquering Khusrau with the august garment of ‘Thou givest kingship to whom Thy wilt’” (Q.3:26) (Khwandamir 1993, 258). As for the two divinely sanctioned powers, Khwandamir tells us that, among the humankind, God
has honored and made powerful two classes. . . . First, the messenger prophets by whom those close to the divine court and the wayfarers along the path [of salvation] are guided. . . . Second, the kings and rulers whose command is legitimate for the ordering of the conditions of groups of people. . . . He distinguished and made exceptional those charged with the ordering of the matter of prophethood by election, according to the miraculous [divine] words, “Verily God has elected [istafa’] Adam and Noah and the House of Abraham and the House of Imran (Moses) upon the worlds” (Q.3:3) . . . and made those elevated to the office of monarchy and Caliphate the cause of order in all that is produced and renovated, according to the vouchsafing Verse, “then we appointed you deputies upon the earth.” (Q.10:15; Khwandamir 1993, 251)9
Literature from the Chanceries (Insha’)
The three typical components of the epistolary collections of the period are (1) the actual and model decrees of the chancelleries of Seljuqs and Khwarazmshahs, or manshurat; (2) the diplomatic correspondence with the other rulers, or sultaniyat; and (3) the secretaries’ letters to individual dignitaries and petitioners, or ikhwaniyat (Paul 1995; Foruzani 2000). The first component has constituted a major source for administrative history (Horst 1964; Lambton 1988), and Jürgen Paul (1995) has effectively drawn on the third component to throw light on the conditions of the administered, the subjects. Here I want to query the important collection of decrees by Baha’ al-Din Muhammad ibn Mu’ayyad Baghdadi, head of the chancellery of Ala’ al-Din Takash Khwarazmshah (1172–1200), which was compiled in the last quarter of the twelfth century (in 1182–84, according to Rypka 1968b, 621) and recognized as a model by contemporaries (Marzban-namah; Lubab al-albab). These decrees contain elaborate statements of the principles of statecraft, which I equate with the pre-Mongol Persianate public law and the political ethic in which it was embedded.
Mu’ayyad Baghdadi opens his collection with a decree he had drafted early in his career (Baghdadi 1937, 13). It is the decree issued by Takash,10 appointing his son, Malikshah, to the governorship of the city of Jand, and it contains a concise mirror for the prince (Baghdadi 1937, 13–38), instructing him in statecraft in order to “revive the firm tradition [sunna] . . . of the martyred Lord [khudawand-i shahid]” (Baghdadi 1937, 15), whom I take to be the prince’s namesake, the Seljuq Malikshah. Other statements in the insha’ collections from Khwarazm leave little room for doubting that the chancellery of the Khwarazmshahs saw itself as belonging to the administrative tradition of the Great Seljuqs founded by Nizam al-Mulk.
The instructions to the prince on the art of government begin with the praise of God as the grantor of kingship (Q.3:2) and source of authority (Q.4:59), who bestowed upon the king the status of the shadow of God [upon the earth] for the maintenance of order on the basis of justice and the observance of the interests of the subjects (masalih-i ri‘aya) (Baghdadi 1937, 13). Protection of religion and the reading of the Book of God to ascertain the shari‘a and Islam’s commandments are a necessary means for royal government based on justice. But the core of royal justice is the maintenance of the social hierarchy, and its chief instrument the exercise of the sword for punishment (siyasat) (Baghdadi 1937, 17–26). It is evident from all the insha’ collections, as from the books on ethics (Marlow 1997), that the maintenance of the social hierarchy meant the acknowledgment of the priority of the notables’ established families for administrative and judiciary appointments.
Punishment, to be carried out by the royal sword, is the danda of the Indian statecraft, transmitted through the Sassanian political lore (Arjomand 2001) and reinforced by the Qur’anic verse 2:179 (175): “In retaliation there is life for you” (Baghdadi 1937, 26). Another decree, granting the iqta‘ of Nesa, instructs its holders to make sure their subordinates observe the “laws of punishments” (qawanin-i siyasat) and applies a different verse to highway robbers, Q.5:33 (37): “This is the recompense for those who fight against God and His Messenger, and hasten about the earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified” (Baghdadi 1937, 35–36).11
The mirror contained in the decree enumerates eight classes of the social hierarchy, the maintenance of whose status and position in society is required by justice: the descendants of the Prophet (sadat), the imams and ulama, the judges (quzat), the Sufi masters, the elite of the subjects, the farmers, the craftsmen, and finally, the tribesmen and/or the military (Baghdadi 1937, 20–22). The maintenance of justice among these classes requires both punishment and economic development (imarat) according to the above-mentioned fundamental maxim of Persianate statecraft: “No kingdom except through men, and no men except through wealth, and no wealth except through development, and no development except through justice by means of punishment” (Baghdadi 1937, 22).12 In Jami‘ al-ulum, the Khwarazmshah’s protégé Fakhr al-Din Razi represents this maxim in a more elaborate graphical form, taken from the tenth-century pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets, as a circle with eight segments.
Furthermore, justice is equated with the Aristotelian [golden] mean and opposed to tyranny or wrongdoing (zulm). Tyranny is highlighted in another decree by citing another maxim of statecraft: “The kingdom will last with infidelity but will not last with tyranny.” The decree of appointment of a viceroy and judge of (the Persian) Iraq, included in a different collection, defines the maintenance of order by kings and rulers as “putting everything in its place [wad‘ al-shay‘ fi mawdi‘ihi], which is the opposite of tyranny/wrongdoing (zulm)” (Nur al-Din Munshi 2002, 49). The king’s need for the advice of his counselors is backed by one of the Qur’anic “Consultation Verses,” Q.3:159 (Baghdadi 1937, 27). Other notable aphorisms of statecraft cited in the collection are “Religion and kingship are twins” (Baghdadi 1937, 102) and, in a curiously corrupt form, “The kingdom [mulk] is the foundation and religion [din] is its guardian; and what has no guardian is destroyed!”13 (Baghdadi 1937, 57, 102). The one principle of Persianate statecraft not specifically mentioned in the mirror is the importance of the use of spies, which is mentioned in other decrees (Baghdadi 1937, 41), notably in a decree of appointment to the diwan-i arz, which was responsible for the royal intelligence service (Nur al-Din Munshi 2002, 99).
Mu’ayyad Baghdadi does not explicitly claim the authority of the Prophet for the title of “shadow of God,” as does Nur al-Din Munshi after him by citing the hadith—“the ruler is the shadow of God upon the earth” (Nur al-Din Munshi 2002, 14)—nor does he explicitly claim religious authority for his royal patron, as Rashid al-Din Watwat had done for Atsiz b. Khwarazmshah, whom he had called “the shadow of God upon the earth and the deputy of the Prophet” (Watwat 2004, 9) and also “the commander of the faithful” (Watwat 2004, 68).14 Nevertheless, he considers the royal charisma (farr-i padshahi) and significantly also the charisma of the [dynasty’s] turn in power (farr-i dawlat) to be a divine emanation (Baghdadi 1937, 29). He also considers the temporal authority of the king absolute and his decrees “enforced by God” (Baghdadi 1937, 78). A vizierate decree in a different collection shows that the authority delegated by the king was equally absolute, as all the officials of the realm were urged “to recognize [the authority of the vizier] as absolute on behalf of our majesty [az hazrat-i ma mutlaq shenasand]” (Nur al-Din Munshi 2002, 44).
The principles of statecraft stated fairly comprehensively for the instruction of the prince-governor of Jand are elaborated separately in other decrees, as appropriate to the function of the appointed official. The vizierate comes next in importance, and it seems fruitful to examine the norms and rules the viziers were instructed to observe in their appointment decrees. The two such decrees included in al-Tawassul ila al-tarassul underscore that the craft of the vizier is based on reason, in contrast to that of the judge, which rests on tradition. I have argued that this conception shows the influence of the Greek political science as the rational art of government (Arjomand 2001). The primary function of the vizier is the maintenance of the body politics’ well-being through the “operational laws of royal government [qawanin-i kar-i padshahi] and the rules for the well-being of the kingdom.” It is exercised by “the methods of justice, punishment, and through the path of reason and acuity [madhahibi adl wa siyasat, wa shari‘at-i aql wa kiyasat]” (Baghdadi 1937, 75). The second decree, appointing a vizier to the above-mentioned Prince Malikshah, considers the foundations of monarchy and the stability of the state crucially dependent on “a vizier adorned with the manifestations of reason” (Baghdadi 1937, 70). His action should be based on “a firm principle and comprehensive law [qanun-i rashad], leaving the derivation of such acts from principles and the varieties of their conditions to reason and the intellect [aql wa khirad]” (Baghdadi 1937, 83). Malikshah is urged to make no decision “without consultation with the perfect reason and the comprehensive intellect,” meaning the vizier (Baghdadi 1937, 84).
A decree of vizierate in a different collection underlines the importance of the maintenance of the social hierarchy by offering the following justification of it that stresses the interdependence of the elite and the masses:
The wisdom of our divine Lord ordained that the population should not sit in equal degrees but be ordered in different ranks, and that different classes should appear; . . . one group to enjoy wealth and maximum of prosperity, another to be afflicted with penury; one class be ensconced at the height of honor, another be isolated in the lows of squalor and abjection, so that they would always be interdependent through need . . . and the path of cooperation among them thus be kept open. The shepherds cannot neglect the flock/subjects as the stability of their position and fulfillment of their comportment depend on the latter, and the common masses will not disobey the elite because the currency of their affairs and prosperity of their crafts depend on that class. (Nur al-Din Munshi 2002, 40–41)15
Embedded in the political ethic of Persianate patrimonial monarchy that is centered on justice and the welfare of the subjects16 are two concepts that can be translated as “public law”: dastur and qanun. The first term is much vaguer and more abstract, referring to a general constitutional principle as well as to the person of the vizier, probably on account of his turban (dastar). The second term is used both abstractly in the sense of public law and concretely to refer to fiscal regulations. In the above-discussed mirror for Prince Malikshah, the term qanun appears in connection with the land tax,17 but the term is also represented as the expression of justice and the mean (hukm-i ma‘dalat) (Baghdadi 1937, 28). In either case, the legitimacy of the qanun is enhanced if it is old, reflecting ancient, unaltered custom. In an iqta‘ grant from the crown lands in favor of another prince, the latter is instructed to make sure his agents do not deviate from the “customary regulations” (qawanin-i muta‘arif) and “ancient rules of transaction” (qawa‘id-i mu‘amilat-i qadim) (Baghdadi 1937, 93). In a decree of appointment of a chief judge to the position of his father, who had resigned, the judge is also instructed to make certain that the agents administering the land and endowments belonging to the judiciary diwan observe “the customary dues [marsum] and the customs [rusum] that were included in the ancient law [qanun-i qadim]” (Baghdadi 1937, 74). The decree is appropriately couched in the need for the observance of the shari‘a and independent legal judgment (ijtihad). The term could also denote public law in the abstract, as in the hyperbolic claim made by the last Khwarazmshah, Jalal al-Din, while retreating south from the Mongol onslaught in an advance proclamation to secure the province of Kirman, that “the secretaries of the chancellery of the heavens [diwan-i falak] have inscribed the law [qanun] of his kingdom [mamlakat]” (Nur al-Din Munshi 2002, 74).18 His chief secretary, who accompanied him during his long flight from the Mongol army, Shahab al-Din Muhammad Nasawi, who had interspersed his account of his desperate flight with Qur’anic verses as much as literary citations, saw the collapse of religion and statecraft as the one and the same consequence of Mongol victory: “the laws [qawanin] of Islam have been completely shaken, . . . the rules of the kingdom have fallen into disorder and the contracts of the state [dawlat] have totally disappeared” (Nasawi 1991, 94).
Taking all the decrees collected by Mu’ayyad Baghdadi in part 1 of al-Tawassul ila al-tarassul (13–125),19 it can be said that, alongside the authority verse (Q.4:59) and just as frequently if not more,20 we have verse Q.3:26, “Thou givest the kingdom to whom Thou Wilt” and its variant (Q.5:54, 57:21, and 62:4),21 and verse 3.159, “And consult them in the affair.” Also conspicuous in these decrees, and even more so elsewhere (Juwayni 1950, 70, 74, 80), is “Surely God bids to justice and good-doing” (Q.16:90 [92]). This verse, and on occasion (Baghdadi 1937, 19, 53) verse Q.38.26, “David, behold, We have appointed thee a viceroy in the earth; therefore judge between men justly,” are adduced to highlight justice as the cardinal principle of statecraft. Finally, verse Q.4:58, “God commands you to deliver trusts back to their owners” is adduced to establish the officials’ duty to return what they are entrusted with to the people (Baghdadi 1937, 70). Other Qur’anic verses, as we have seen, are cited ad hoc for normative as well as stylistic purposes. The most frequently cited and significant hadith is “You are all shepherds, and all of you are responsible for your flock” (kullukum ra‘ wa kullukum mas’ul an ra‘iyatihi) (Baghdadi 1937, 40, 98). Another important cited tradition is “The people have the religion of their kings” (Baghdadi 1937, 116). Other sayings of the Prophet are adduced ad hoc.
It is evident from the insha’ literature surveyed above (see also, Nur al-Din Munshi 2002, index of Qur’anic verses, 373–93, and of traditions, 394–97) that the secretaries were eager to establish the principles of statecraft as their own normative tradition (sunna) and that, like the jurists, they drew extensively on the Qur’an, and to a lesser extent the hadith, in their elaborations of the maxims of royal government and justice. The same bureaucratic class was engaged in creating a tradition of administration with generally accepted grounds for legitimation and shared principles of normative hermeneutics. In this way, the main sources of Islamic law were added to the tradition of kings and the maxims of statecraft to complete the normative hermeneutic of Persianate political ethic.
Formation of an Administrative Tradition and Obstacles Thereto
In his Mafatih al-ulum (Keys to the sciences), written in the latter part of the tenth century by Muhammad b. Ahmad Katib Khwarazmi, the craft of the secretaries, alongside jurisprudence (fiqh), is included among the six “sciences of the shari‘a,” in contrast to the nine sciences emanating from the Greeks and other nations.22 The two bureaucratic and clerical professions were still not completely separated three centuries later: Nur al-Din Munshi, the secretary to the last Khwarazmshah and the compiler of Wasa’il al-rasa’il wa dala’il al-faza’il, was a cleric, as had been the famous Qur’an commentator Zamakhshari, from whom Rashid al-Din Watwat had hoped to learn the craft of the secretary (Watwat 2004, intro.). The differential success of the jurists and the scribes in legitimating their respective crafts and professional identities was far from evident, especially in light of the serious challenge of the Sufis to juristic authority. The formation of a juristic tradition in Islam is well studied, while the attempt to create a parallel administrative tradition has received scant attention.
The great Seljuq vizier, Nizam al-Mulk Tusi, took a major step toward the formation of an Islamically legitimated administrative tradition by integrating the vizierate into the dual theory of power. Nizam al-Mulk, whose Nizamiyah colleges throughout the Seljuq Empire were the main agency of “the Sunni restoration,” was certainly aware of the value of traditional legitimation, as was demonstrated by his symbolic gesture of holding a session to personally dictate hadith in the library of the Nizamiyah during his last visit to Baghdad in 1091 (Arjomand 1999). In his trail-blazing Siyar al-muluk (Nizam al-Mulk 1978, 233–34), he was careful in his choice of words to adduce both traditions of the kings and the prophets to legitimate the authority of the vizier: “Every king who has attained greatness . . . has had good viziers, as have had the great prophets.” Great kings such as Khusrau I Anushirvan and the Ghaznavid sultan Mahmud have appointed great viziers and “the sunna [custom or tradition] of the prophets and the sirah of the kings have thus become well-known tales.”
Nizam al-Mulk’s project of creating an administrative tradition of the secretaries alongside the legal tradition of the ulama gave birth to a new genre in Persian literature, the history of the viziers, modeled on the earlier Arabic kitab/akhbar al-vuzara’ (for a bibliographic survey by M. T. Danishpazhuh, see Qumi 1985, 18–24). In the following century Najm al-Din Abu al-Raja’ Qumi wrote an extremely detailed history of the Seljuq viziers in the fifty years preceding the publication of his Tarikh al-vuzara’ in 1188.23 Qumi’s concern is not so much with the normative hermeneutics but with actual administrative history, which could serve as a reliable record of precedents to guide administration. In Dastur al-vuzara’, written in the following decade, a major concern of the author, by contrast, is the legitimation of administrative authority in terms of the traditions of the kings on the one hand and of the Prophet and his caliphs on the other. To justify a tradition of vizierate on the basis of the tradition of kings, Mahmud ibn Muhammad Isfahani equates the turban of the vizier with the crown to signify the delegation of royal authority to him, and he sees it as adorning the head of “the lord of vizierate and the mufti of the seat of the shari‘at” (Isfahani 1985, 40). What is more interesting from my point of view is that Qur’anic verses and traditions from the Prophet and his disciples (sahabah) are cited very frequently and given normative priority over the maxims of statecraft and poetry. Of some fifty-five verses cited (listed in Isfahani 1985, 246–48), Q.3:26 (“Thou givest the kingdom to whom Thou wilt, and takest away from whom Thou wilt!”) occurs most frequently (four times). Perhaps the most pertinent of the cited traditions is the saying of the Prophet: “For him who institutes a good tradition [man sanna sunnah hasanah], there is a reward, and a reward for whoever acts according to it” (Isfahani 1985, 29). The goal of this solid traditional backing is, however, to justify and elaborate an autonomous administrative tradition with whose foundation he credits Nizam al-Mulk (Isfahani 1985, 67). The norms of giving gifts to the king, for instance, are said to amount to “an approved tradition [sunna]” with respect to which the viziers have made “the law of their predecessors [qanun-i aslaf] their own regulation [dastur].” Several traditions from the Prophet, one from Abd Allah ibn Abbas and one from Ali, are cited in support of this (Isfahani 1985, 110–11).
Nizami Arudi begins his book, written around 1154, with “the authority verse,” Q.4:59 (1962, 3), and inserts the caliph/imam into the chain of derivation of kingship from God to enhance its legitimacy, but in substance it only affirms the theory of the two powers. The Prophet needs a deputy (na’ib) “to sustain his law and tradition [shar‘ wa sunna]” who is called the imam and in turn needs a deputy with executive power “who is called malik, meaning padshah [king].”
Therefore the king is the deputy of the imam, and the imam is the deputy of the Messenger and the Messenger is the deputy of God Most High. Firdawsi has said this well: “Know that kingship and prophethood are two stones in the one ring.”
And as the Lord of the sons of Adam [i.e., Muhammad] himself says, “Religion and monarchy are twins.” (Nizami 1962, 10–11)
His four essays in the book are devoted to justifying the four crafts whose practitioners are the counselors of the kings and pillars of the kingdom: the secretaries, the poets, the astronomers, and the physicians. The first and most important, the craft of the secretary (dabir), on whom depends the establishment of the kingdom (qawam-i mulk) (Nizami Arudi 1962, 11), requires dexterity in the citation of the Qur’an and traditions (Nizami Arudi 1962, 14, 25). It is interesting to note in passing that Nizami Arudi, who practiced all the four crafts (Nizami Arudi 1962, 87), claims that his master in astronomy, Umar Khayyam, who dutifully performed his function of casting horoscopes for his royal patrons to determine auspicious hours, “did not at all believe in horoscopes/astral determination [ahkam-i nujum], and I have not seen or heard of any of the great men who believes in them!” (Nizami Arudi 1962, 63). Great men, at any rate, are not cultural dupes.
Mubarakshah also has an important chapter (5) on the vizierate, in which the vizierate is given revealed and traditional sanction and indeed derives from prophethood. God’s appointment of Aaron as the vizier (helper) of Moses (Q.25:35) is paraphrased as a request: “Make him my partner in whatever task you ordain for me, meaning prophecy. This would be right because the vizier is the partner in kingship and his transactions (binding and loosening) in the kingdom are more current than those of the king because the well-being of the kingdom is entrusted to him.”
Muhammad is also reported to say, “I have two viziers in heavens [Gabriel and Michael] and two on earth [Umar and Abu Bakr]” (Mubarakshah 1967, 129), and the chapter ends with a citation from Ali (Mubarakshah 1967, 139).
From the Il-Khanid period, too, we have a number of histories of the vizierate that fortify administrative history and legitimate administrative practice with occasional, apposite adducing of supportive Qur’anic verses and prophetic traditions. Hindushah Nakhjavani, known as Sahibi, wrote a greatly expanded translation/adaptation of Ibn al-Tiqtaqa’s book on the caliphs and viziers, Kitab al-Fakhri (written in 1301–2),24 barely a quarter-century later in 1324. Sahibi, who belonged to an old bureaucratic family and served as deputy governor of the city of Kashan on behalf of his brother, is the father of the author of the best-known fourteenth-century manual on administration, Dastur al-katib. He was a graduate of the Mustansariyah college in Baghdad and had also studied with the masters of the Nizamiyah of that city. He was evidently aware of the importance of building a well-legitimated tradition in the ethics of statecraft, especially the norms of vizierate. He begins with the Prophet and his caliphs, and offers a history of the viziers who served them, taking care to adduce some twenty-five Qur’anic verses in addition to the usual smattering of traditions and maxims. It should be noted that he does not deal with pre-Islamic kingship, although he has no hesitation about including the viziers of the Fatimids, the Buyids, and the Seljuqs.
In another, more original book on the history of the vizierate written in 1325, Nasa’im al-ashar min lata’im al-akhbar (Kermani 1959, 136), dedicated to “the shadow of the merciful God, Sultan son of Sultan Abu Sa‘id Bahadur Khan,” Nasir al-Din Munshi Kermani cites the same Qur’anic verse and tradition as Mubarakshah as well as a few others to legitimate the vizierate (Kermani 1959, 2–4). He explains the goal of his historical research as “the collection of the traditions [akhbar] and works of the class of viziers . . . and investigation of their biographies and exploration of their customs [siyar] . . . since the dawning of the vanguard of the army of the Muhammadan reign [dawlat] and the sunrise of the nation [millat] of Ahmad” (Kermani 1959, 5). He begins his treatise with the viziers of the rightly guided caliphs and emphasizes that the greatest of the viziers, Nizam al-Mulk, was the vizier of the caliph and the sultan at the same time (Kermani 1959, 12, 31). More than once, this valuable historical record of the Gaznavid, Seljuq, and Il-Khanid vizierate offers an important insight to the stunted growth of the administrative tradition of the viziers in comparison to the legal one of the ulama. Surveying the long history of the caliphate that had been overthrown seven decades before his writing, our Munshi from Kerman offers the following reflection: “During those four hundred years, only these four viziers died in office, and all the rest were either put to the sword or, after dismissal, incurred the wrath of kings or in jail succumbed to fate and were trodden down by fear and danger” (Kermani 1959, 31).
Conclusion
Expressing his horror at what he took to be the pollution of an Islam born fully formed into history by the non-Arab clients (mawali) (who were in fact its chief architects as a world religion), Gibb (1962, 72) asserted that the reception of the Sassanian political tradition, which evolved into the Perso-Islamicate political ethic examined in this chapter, “introduced into Islamic society a kernel of derangement” because the strands thus “woven into the fabric of Muslim thought were, and remained, foreign to its native constitution.” Echoing the same sentiment of horror at the corruption of pristine, “tribal” Islam in her recent restatement of the Orientalist conventional wisdom on the illegitimacy of government in Islam, Patricia Crone has this to say about the “men who styled themselves amirs, kings, and sultans”: “Devoid of legal status and moral significance, they were rulers of the type that the Muslims had initially seen themselves as called upon to eliminate, and though they learnt to live with them, they could never see them as intrinsically Islamic” (Crone 2004b, 146).
The very short preface to Khwandamir’s Qanun-i humayuni is grounded in eight Qur’anic verses that are universally recognized by all Muslims as the word of God and ultimate source of authority. What right do Gibb and Crone have to consider it deranged and not “intrinsically Islamic”? Neither Crone nor I have any direct evidence for what “the Muslims” really thought, and we both must infer such evidence from a body of texts assumed to have been read by the literate. My opening remarks about the texts read in Iranian schools down to World War II was a statement about the wide, inferred readership of the texts chosen as my sources. The evidence I have presented on the care taken by the architects of the Perso-Islamicate tradition of political ethic and statecraft to justify that tradition as Islamic by resting it on the two scriptural sources of Islamic law suggests that the proponents of the thesis of the inescapably un-Islamic character of all Muslim governments are barking up the wrong tree. Rather than taking comfort in the Islamists’ tendentious neglect of history, they should have the humility to let the Muslim historical subjects speak for themselves, or at any rate through the texts catered for their readership.
1. I use these terms as conceptualized by Hodgson 1974.
2. This genre developed in certain western Muslim lands but not much in the eastern lands.
3. Aziz Al-Azmeh 1997 has done much to inject a dose of historical reality into the conventional wisdom with his Muslim Kingship, but much more remains to be done.
4. Among the early jurists, Abu Yusuf used sunna in the sense of approved tradition and urged the caliph to institute good ones; Ibn Ishaq, Shaybani, and others use siyar as normative models. Streusand 2006 shows how Gibb is misreading Abu Yusuf’s celebrated work of jurisprudence, Kitab al-kharaj, which is in fact fully consistent with mirrors for the princes in statecraft.
5. The most glaring omission in this reception, I have argued, was the neglect of Aristotle’s Politics (Arjomand 2001).
6. Al-Amiri goes even further (1967, 119) and tries to reconcile religious jurisprudence and statecraft based on political science in view of the overlap between the religious and the political spheres.
7. The historical as distinct from pedagogical value of this literature has been highlighted by a number of scholars (Roemer 1971 and Paul 1995) but does not concern us here.
8. Curiously, Mubarakshah’s first chapter on the generosity and clemency of kings consists mainly of the stories about the Prophet, the descendants of Ali, Hasan, “the commander of the faithful Hussein” [sic], and Muhammad al-Baqir (Mubarakshah 1967, 28), and those of Hajjaj, Abu Muslim, and the Abbasids.
9. Here, as with Abu al-Hasan al-Amiri five centuries earlier, there can be no question about an invidious contrast between prophets and kings, as the same class of persons happen to be holders of both offices by God.
10. An added reason for the significance of this decree was that the conquest of Jand marked the ascendance of Takash to the throne (Baghdadi 1937, 14). The city was completely destroyed by the Mongols and never rebuilt.
11. The same verse is adduced to justify the punishment of highway robbers in Juwayni 1950, 25, 79.
12. The maxim is cited again in a slightly abbreviated form in another decree (Baghdadi 1937, 110).
13. In the correct form, religion is the foundation and the king (malik) the guardian.
14. It should be noted that this appropriation of the caliphal title of “the commander of the faithful” occurred long before the clash between the Khwarazmshahs and the caliph.
15. One of Watwat’s decrees provides a contrasting political division of the population into three classes, those loyal to the dynasty, the dissidents engaged in opposition and conspiracy against it, “and the third class which are called the ‘commoners of the city’ . . . This class consists of the masters of the crafts and the people of cultivation; they know neither loyalty to kings, nor treachery . . . The short of their preoccupation is with the provision of livelihood and the management of their family [wife and children], and they therefore always keep away from trouble, and are close to [political] health” (Watwat 2004, 45).
16. Here, as elsewhere, I find Max Weber’s (1978, 2:1006–69) ideal type of patrimonialism applicable to Persianate monarchies. His characterization of its ethos in terms of concern for substantive justice (Weber 1978, 2:856–57), i.e., fairness to the subjects and promotion of their welfare, is particularly apposite.
17. The precise expression is “qanun-i mu‘ayyan wa mal-i muqannan”; cf. “qanun-i mu‘ayyan wa kharaj-i mubin” in Baghdadi 1937, 35, and “dasturat-i . . . mu‘amilat wa qawanin-i muhasibat” and “dasturat-i qadim wa qawanin-i muta‘arif” in Watwat 2004, 79.
18. It must be emphasized that the concern for the well-being of the subjects is conspicuous in all these decrees, where the mention of the subjects/flock (ra‘iyah, ri‘aya) is frequently qualified by the phrase “may God be their shepherd” (ra‘ahum Allah) (Baghdadi 1937, 94, 109, 121; also Juwayni 1950, 71). They are frequently addressed in the decrees, and as Paul notes (1995, 544–45), some appointments were made upon their request. The paper can be expanded by a section on the subjects, drawing on the ikhwaniyat sections of the insha’ collections, and put in the context of my contention (1999) that the relative strength of civil society in relation to the patrimonial state should be treated as a historical variable and that it was considerably greater in the Qaznavid and Seljuq Iran than after the Mongol invasion.
19. For the purpose at hand, I am excluding the two proclamations of victory (fathnamah) and an oath of loyalty by a local ruler to Khwarazmshah Il-Arslan included in part 1 (Baghdadi 1937, 125–44).
20. In Nur al-Din Munshi 2002, Q.3:26 and its variant are cited more than Q.5:49.
21. Yet another variant, “[God] grants wisdom to whom He wills” (Q.2:269), is also quoted twice (Baghdadi 1937, 52, 101) but with reference to a member of the religious elite, the ulama.
22. He also significantly defines insha’ as the draft prepared by a secretary for submission to the diwan.
23. A similar work was written a half-century earlier but is no longer extant (Qumi 1985, 24).
24. It is nearly three times the size of the original.