Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft

5. An Anomaly in the History of Persian Political Thought

107 5 An Anomaly in the History of Persian Political Thought J ava d T a b a t a b a i The history of Persian political thinking is generally considered to be an integral part of the study of Islamic political thought. By generalizing the specificities of so-called Islamic political thought, historians of Islamic studies tend to focus on the dominance of the Islamic paradigm in Persian political thinking. According to this approach, Persian society became increasingly Islamized as a result of the Arab conquest, and it was organized and ruled by Islamic law with a political theory drawn from the Qur’an and Islamic tradition. Although Persia, along with many other regions of the Islamic Empire, formally became Islamized to some extent, this Islamization was a much more complicated process than is often assumed. For this reason, general studies of Islamic political thought must be examined using a country-specific analysis. Thanks to many careful studies of Islamic political thought produced over the past two centuries , we not only know much about this subject’s sources, representatives, and trends, but we also have a thorough understanding of its intellectual arguments. However, most of our knowledge about the varieties of political thought in different regions of the Islamic world is still contingent on Islamic studies in the broader sense. Before I begin this discussion, I would like to draw the readers’ attention to the history of the Persian historiography in the Islamic period. Indeed, pre-Islamic “advice literature” and historical writings were closely associated, and following Islam’s advent, the main sources of Persian 108 • Javad Tabatabai historiography also constituted sources of political thought. Between Franz Rosenthal’s classical study A History of Muslim Historiography (1968) and Chase F. Robinson’s Islamic Historiography (2003), much research has been conducted, but it is astonishing that there is little or no mention of the Persian school of historiography from the tenth century to the Mongol invasion. Most of these works by historians are in Arabic, and Persian historians attract little attention if they do not write in Arabic. The Persian histories written in Persian such as Bayhaqi’s and Juwayni’s works (1989 and 1958 respectively) remain a corps étranger among the general scholarship in Islamic studies.1 By confining their research to works in Arabic, these scholars are limiting themselves to a partial perspective or view of their subject. Indeed, in the Persian school of historiography (especially in the writings of Ibn Miskawayh and Bayhaqi), the influence of traditionalism was held in check, and reason became the foundation of their approach. These two historians do not include prophecies, miracles , or nonfactual events in their examination and analyses. Bayhaqi’s commitment (1989, 149) to write a “fundamental history,” in contrast to histories that use fictional sources, and Ibn Miskawayh’s attempt (1990, 1:51–53) to purge all imaginative or nonrational events from his history indicate important steps taken toward achieving what has been called “the renaissance of Islam” or “the golden age of Persia” (Frye 1975a). In my view, this “golden age” was made possible by the reemergence of “reason” as an explanatory paradigm and with its line drawn against traditionalism in modern scholarship. Even if political thought had had quite a different evolution in Persia , one can observe the same distancing of Islamic traditionalism in the elaboration of a new political discourse independent from the Qur’an and the traditions. I do not contest the assertion that Islam is an eminently political religion, but I would like to draw attention to the fact that the first treatise on politics drawn from the Qur’an and the traditions was not 1. There are some exceptions: Marilyn Robinson Waldman’s book (1980) on Bayhaqi is an interesting one. Juwayni’s Mongol history is translated in English (1958). Also, Holt and Lewis 1962 is useful on some aspects of Persian historiography. Anomaly in Persian Political Thought • 109 written until the mid-eleventh century when the caliphate was in deep crisis and an efficient political institution in the Islamic Empire was about to vanish. The history of Persian political thought, which cannot be reduced to an epiphenomenon, reflects a different approach for the early centuries of Islam. Before internal conflict among different religious sects was understood in terms of political theory, the practice and theory of governance were important and necessary parts of the Persian legacy. Of all the...