PLATO OF MIND AND JOSEPH OF COUNTENANCE

Abstract

The 'Book of Good Counsel' (Andarzname), which is widely and unaccountably known as Qabusname, has, from very early on, enjoyed popularity in two linguistic domains, first that of its native Persian and subsequently, that of (pre-)Ottoman Turkish.1 For the past two centuries, it has been renowned among Western students of medieval Iran and Islam of the most diverse specializations. Indeed, its compass is much broader than would be indicated by its conventional designation as a 'mirror for princes', even though its first express addressee was a young prince, Gllanshah, and the exigencies of his presumptive career as amir figure prominently in the text. However, the dedicatee's father and the author of the book, the Ziyarid prince Kay Ka'us b. Eskandar, was enough of a realist not to trust blindly in the permanence of his dynasty's political fortunes. In order to prepare his son for unforeseen circumstances, he expanded the scope of his work to include, in addition to advice on the proper conduct of affairs of state, of the household and the self, surveys of a number of civil and military professions as well, from those of religious scholar, physician, merchant to those of poet and minstrel to that of military leader in short, all those indispensable to any ruler and at any court. The book's particular charm is owed to the fact that the author was not a professional litterateur or scholar, but a practitioner of statecraft, on however reduced a scale, on the one hand, and an enthusiastic dilettante of adab on the other. Kay Ka'us's down-to-earth realism, alluded to above, and common sense, informed by long experience,