Nizam al-Mulk Remembered

The focus in the fifth and final chapter is on the afterlife of Nizam al-Mulk, of his legacy as well as of his representations. By the late fifteenth century, in Timurid Iran, Nizam al-Mulk is already the stuff of legend. In one historian’s estimation, the vizier is a veritable eleventh-century avatar of the martyr par excellence of Shi’i lore Husayn b. ‘Ali (d. 680), and the progenitor of modern Iran. But the story of Nizam al-Mulk does not end with his metamorphosis into a crypto-Shi‘i and a proto-Iranian patriot. In the 2010s, it is Nizam al-Mulk who is the most regularly invoked exemplar of legitimate Islamic governance, exhorting prudence and expedience to guide the Iranian polity through the treacherous waters of nuclear negotiations with the West, and to domesticate outlier and extremist fervor. The Iranian invocation of Nizam al-Mulk differs radically from his depiction in modern Sunni—Arab or Turkish—historiography. That living legacy is the true history of the laureled vizier.

Representations of Nizam al-Mulk

Who was Nizam al-Mulk? In a similar way to ‘Umar II and Charlemagne, Nizam al-Mulk is praised in medieval historiography not just for his political acumen, but also for his knowledge of law, patronage of the clerics, and his ability to stand his ground in religious debate. Nizam al-Mulk crossed the chasm that divided politicians from religious professionals, the one that separated Islamic from Iranian, Sufi from legist, Turk from Persian, Hanafi from Shafi‘i, and sultan from caliph. His uniqueness is reinforced by his enduring legacy, which contrary to current scholarship is shaped not by the Nizamiyya schools, but by his Siyar al-muluk, a guide to good rule written for the Saljuq sultan, Malikshah (r. 1073-1092). This chapter argues that the life of Nizam al-Mulk and its many retellings provide a fulcrum, or an organizing principle, for perceiving the transformation of the social order in medieval Iran.

Nizam al-Mulk and Alterity

Alterity is inflected with allegorical valences in Nizam al-Mulk’s biographies. Medieval historians imagined the vizier as the sultan’s alter ego: he is old and wise, learned and vigilant, Persian and Shafi‘i; the sultan is young and brash, frivolous and uncouth, Turkic and Hanafi. They also upheld him as a paragon of non-partisanship and stressed his willingness to compromise. In Siyar al-muluk, his mirror for the Saljuq prince, on the other hand, governance is inflected with the language of religious and ethnic difference. This chapter attempts to reconcile these seemingly contradictory assessments. The vizier’s policies vis-à-vis Turkic rulers, Abbasid caliphs, and heretics including Shi‘is and Sufis are scrutinized to suggest that secular, political concerns couched in the language of religious metaphors may be read to reveal the scaffolding of authority in medieval Islamic thought.

Of History and Biography

Is there an essentially “Islamic” tradition of biographical writing? To put this to the test, the chapter focuses on the roughly contemporaneous medieval biographies, by Einhard (d. 840) and Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam (d. 829)—both secular firsts—of two non-contemporary rulers: Charlemagne (r. 768-814) and ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (r. 717-20). Accounting for similarities or differences in both style and content of biographical writings in different historical milieus induces a new understanding of the relationship between text and context, and offers new modes of reading. A more complex ancillary of this revision is a fresh look at exchange, transmission or crosspollination to explain instances of convergence between alien texts. The distant objective is a new model for global history that has the conceptual arsenal to explain what specific role representations play in the history of the social order.

Origins

In the pursuit of political thought on authoritative and efficacious rule, this chapter contains a brief introduction to those currents that shaped the eleventh century: the coming of the Turks to the eastern Islamic world, and the interaction of Turkic rulers with the Abbasids and local elites, to which Nizam al-Mulk belonged, as narrated in the medieval histories with a particular élan. Drawing on new scholarship on ethnicity, ethnogenesis, and nomadic polities, it argues that normative assumptions that color medieval accounts of Saljuq tribal and political organization offer insights that have hitherto been neglected. Ethnonyms and toponyms are frequently used in medieval sources as situational constructs, camouflaging alliances and ideological proclivities.