This article offers a counter-reading of the Ghaznavid panegyric that resists reducing its idiom of praise to an effect of political legitimation, as dominant accounts of the genre have done. By highlighting how two panegyrics, one by ʿUnṣurī and the other by Farrukhī, subvert the aesthetic-didactic expectations surrounding praise born from Islamicate rhetorical and poetic theory, it contends that Persian panegyric poetry does not transparently deploy praise. To this end, the article first proposes four structures of praise that render praise both legible and susceptible to ironizing: evidentiary agreement, intradistich agreement, interdistich agreement, and metapoetic balance. A subsequent analysis of ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī’s panegyrics reveals how ostensibly laudatory claims can ironize these structures to produce effects of delegitimation, rather than legitimation, while maintaining a posture of praise.
