Advice for the Sultan: Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in Medieval Islam

摘要

Islamicate advice literature, of which the two most celebrated examples are Kalila wa Dimna and Nizam al-Mulk's Siyar al-Muluk, was central to political thought across the diverse cultures of the pre-modern Islamic world but has latterly become an intellectual orphan. In the modern Islamic world, it has no traction in political debates, a lamentable caesura between the present and the past. In the West, it was used experimentally as a colonial language teaching tool and briefly read with enthusiasm for its literary value (see, for example, the preface to Rev. Wyndham Knatchbull's 1819 translation of Kalila wa Dimna) before going out of fashion. It was ignored for some time because it appeared to be neither a good source for historical information nor for morals, apparently disqualified by the high body count of viziers meeting gruesome ends and so on. Eventually scholars rethought the texts' historicity and embarked on a campaign of reading between the lines, often finding themselves frustrated by the texts' stubbornness in giving up the historical facts they sought. A great deal of recent scholarship has focussed on reconstructing the transmission of the texts and the stories contained in them.