Neguin Yavari has been working on Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 1092) and his famous book on governance, the Siyar al-Mulūk, also known as the Siyāsat-nāme, for many years; she has published the entries “Neẓām-al-Molk” and “Siar al-Moluk” in the Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, both in 2015. The present book goes beyond her earlier work in many ways.
First, it is an essay on biography. Biographical writing (as distinct from historiography) is introduced in the first chapter, and discussed in cross-cultural comparison. ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 717–20) and Charlemagne are adduced as examples. Their biographers have made them into symbols or meta-signs for a number of features: good governance, the figure of the just and pious king, and so forth. This is a line of enquiry worth pursuing: many figures of the past, not only in the Muslim world and Western Europe, stand for some trait of good or bad rulership, and pre-modern authors take it for granted that their readers are cultivated enough to be able to take a hint.
Niẓām al-Mulk has become a symbol for good governance, and he has contributed himself to making a myth out of his performance as a grand vizier. Yavari discusses Niẓām al-Mulk's position as an ideal vizier in chapters 3–5. Of these, chapter 3 is closest to a “classical” biography in that it follows the chronology, but even here, the author succeeds in bringing in important comments, on the Niẓāmiyya madrasas for instance. Reputed as they are in modern scholarship, she shows that their scholarly output is meagre and that we do not find any traces of powerful networks based on these schools. Chapter 4 discusses groups with whom Niẓām al-Mulk had to deal: Turks, caliphs, heretics and Sufis. In his dealings with all of these, Niẓām al-Mulk showed his acumen as an administrator, but also his genuine concern for the Islamic polity – or this is what the sources make us believe. Chapter 5, in turn, is dedicated to the memory of Niẓām al-Mulk, from the pre-Mongol period to the twentieth century.
The book is only partly an attempt at reconstructing the life and times of its subject; it does not aim at elucidating events (even though there are some pertinent remarks on that level and also, for example, on the circumstances of Niẓām al-Mulk's death). Instead, it shows how its hero becomes increasingly just that: a hero. Perhaps it is for that reason that very late sources (such as the late Timurid Khwāndamīr) are quoted on the same level as contemporary or near-contemporary ones: they all reflect the process of how the figure of the Grand Vizier is being constructed.
Chapter 2, on “Origins”, is the weakest. It gives a very brief outline of the coming of the Seljuq Turks to Iran, and also a summary of earlier Turkic history. It did not become clear to me what this passage was meant to achieve in the context of the book, and why a reference to Peter Golden's Introduction to the History of the Turkish Peoples (Wiesbaden, 1992) was not enough. It is in this chapter also that the author alludes to the debate around David Sneath and his Headless State (New York, 2007). On the one hand, the author states – following Sneath – that the Seljuqs, like the Toquz Oghuz to whom they allegedly belonged, were “not a kinship-based entity” (p. 52), and on the other, she claims that “like other Altaic peoples of Inner Asia, the Toquz Oghuz had a kinship-based […] social organization, with a unilineal genealogy, which tied all members to a common ancestor after whom they were named” (p. 45), exactly the opposite. The author seems to be unwilling to take a position in the controversy.
Another controversy concerns Richard Bulliet's Cotton, Climate and Camels (New York, 2009), where the migration of the Turks into Iran is linked to climate change, the “Big Chill”. The author quotes Andrew Peacock and the present writer as discounting climate change as a principal cause of Seljuq migration (p. 46), but the argument(s) are not discussed so that later, Bulliet's thesis is repeated without restriction (p. 136).
A number of factual errors and problematic readings have to be noted. Khalīfat rasūl Allāh does not mean “God's vicegerent on Earth” (p. 13), but the successor of the Prophet of God, and the debate in the Umayyad context is whether the caliph indeed was “God's Caliph”, to quote the title of the ground-breaking study by Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds (first published Cambridge, 1986).
The first Qarakhanid ruler to penetrate deep into Transoxiana was Hārūn b. Sulaymān b. Satuq Bughra Khan (d. 992); a grandson, not a son of the legendary Satuq (p. 56).
The Seljuqs can be said to have a lack-lustre record as patrons of historians, but this is not exceptional: the Sāmānids did patronise historians, but not for their own history; the Qarakhanids did not produce any court history; neither did regional dynasties in western Iran, and what we have for the Būyids was not written at their request. Thus, it is rather the Ghaznavids who are the exception (p. 76).
Alp Arslan died in 1072 on a campaign against the Qarakhanids, not against an “unruly emir” (p. 79).
Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib did not write the Qutadgu Bilig in Chaghatay (p. 130), but in another Turkic language called “Qarakhanid Turkic”.
This does not detract from the value of the book. It is a novel approach to writing history, and it would be excellent if it found its emulators.
