Mirrors for Princes or a Hall of Mirrors? Niẓām al-Mulk's Siyar al-mulūk Reconsidered

Abstract

Mirrors for princes have often been dismissed as rambling collections of timeless aphorisms and vapid didactic tales, impervious to their own historical context, and hence of little use to a historian. Partly as a reaction to this, attempts have been made to endow them with significance by marshalling them into a chronological order as foot soldiers in the battle against religious control of the political realm and the march towards secularization. But by ignoring the rhetorical aspects of these works and the intricate relationship between their form and content, both approaches tend to either oversimplify or distort the discourses as historical sources. By reading them differently, through, rather than shorn of their own rhetoric, they yield insights into their contemporaneous ideologies and worldviews. Studied from a comparative perspective, ethnic, sectarian, and theological differences that are the staple of their political language, acquire new life as idioms for compromise and political engagement rather than as vehicles of prejudice and denunciation.