Papers by Ömer Faruk Tanrıverdi
W ritings on the appropriate conduct of rulers, the organization of rule, its aims and justificat... more W ritings on the appropriate conduct of rulers, the organization of rule, its aims and justification, pervade Arabic and Persian literature , and both literatures are interconnected via translations and borrowings in this realm. Together they constitute a robust textual corpus produced over centuries by Muslim authors from Spain to India and from Central Asia to the Sahara. One may distinguish various genres within this field of writing, even if boundaries are often blurred: political testaments in epistolary form, mirrors for princes offering counsel—in itself a varied genre—including treatises on ethics and political philosophy designed to give advice to rulers; handbooks on political administration; works on law or more particularly state law; works on political philosophy proper; adab compendia collecting sayings and exempla about the recom-mendable conduct of rulers; and historiography presenting exempla of good or remarkable rule. Political Discourse In the following, our interest in political literature is related to the first, most prolific and persistent group in an attempt to retrieve aspects of the political thought it conveys. This perspective is necessarily analytical and selective. The literary character of the mirror for princes genre is often daunting and prevalently manifest in elaborate style, artful composition and selective compilation from a large repertoire of established traditions. It thus tends to take precedence over political discourse. The politico-mor-alist idiom which pervades this literature is also not directly supportive of the discussion and negotiation of political issues. The conjunction of ethics and power, or the idea that rule is sustained when it obliges to the norms of the good and recommendable conduct, is a basic presumption in most of the writings in this realm, except for those advocating an a-moralist application of autonomous techniques of power. Somewhat in contrast to these trends we are giving attention to those aspects of discourse that refer to regula
Uploads
Papers by Ömer Faruk Tanrıverdi