The Future of Iran's Past

The background to this interesting study of the consummate ‘vizier’ of medieval Islam, Nizam al-Mulk, lies in the recognition of two platitudes of modern intellectual thought. The first is the presentism inherent in any historical study, and the simple fact that every age reconceptualises its memory and history in terms that are meaningful for it. The second is that any study of political thought or ideas – tied up with the rhetoric of history as is often the case – is a contemporary reflection of the dystopian and utopian understandings and critiques of the present. Yavari’s book is both a study of the vizier and of his reception in modern Iran in which the more reified but contested nature of identities such as Iranian, Turk, Sunni, Shi[i are far more apparent. And then there is the presumption around the nature of political thought in pre-modern Islam, that legitimacy of the public order was often tied to power and that obedience was the norm (and rebellion very much the aberration). The loyalism and the statecraft predicated upon the legitimacy of the social and political order presided over by the ruler as sovereignty of the divine on earth had a lasting impact on the medieval reception of political thought alongside the standard account of what is described as a ‘Turco-Mongol-Persian’ theory of kingship culminating in the millennial sovereign of the early modern period. Throughout the work, Yavari has one eye on the broader comparative context of kingship with comparisons to Charlemagne and others.