Neguin Yavari - Böcker

Topics in methodology and narrative strategies form the focus of several articles in the medieval period, including the use of biblical metaphors and the portraiture of a courtesan to competing paradigms of legitimacy in the mid-eighth century. European encounters with Islam in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries and the contemporary practice of horsemanship pertain to the early modern period, while reactions to the Balfour Declaration, Islamism in the early twentieth century, the Middle East in crime fiction, and the use of the pre-Islamic past as nationalist propaganda are among the themes dealing with recent history.

Global Medieval: Mirrors for Princes Reconsidered begins with a question: Is a genuine history of political thought in the premodern period possible? The volume brings together mirrors for princes from a variety of historical contexts and lineages of political thought, each with its own international cast of characters and varied modes of advice, sanctified by claims of distant and often alien origins. Placed in a comparative structure, these texts become a powerful lens for exploring ideals and manners of good rule across political, religious, and cultural divides. The temporal frame, focused on the eras preceding the rise of Europe, the advent of modern technologies of communications, and the rule of nation-states, challenges the modern commonplace that insists on an increased velocity of exchange as well as a linear dissemination of ideas as normative of global thought. The global reach, which points to similarities in political thought amid incongruous historical contexts, questions the modern practice of reading the history of political thought as a genealogy of modern political concepts, confined in multivalent demarcations of context, which ultimately and collectively reduce political thought to a prescriptive norm and a universal gospel of liberal values.

In Advice for the Sultan Neguin Yavari excavates multiple, conflicting strands of Islamic political thought from the medieval past to the present, reassessing these ideas and their impact over the longue duree. Her aim is to revise our understanding of the relation- ship between modern history and the current master narratives of both Western and Islamic histories of political thought. She does this by re-examinating Islamic advice literature, bringing it to life in novel ways. Yavari argues that if read laterally and closely, it promotes secular values such as reason and moderation as the most effective safeguard against political instability and divine rebuke. Related questions raised in this book include, can Islamic political thought be folded into the discipline of intellectual history? How do we write the history of political thought when its end-product is not seen as the march of a manifest destiny, or progressive secularisation, or the promotion of liberal values, such as is the case with the Islamic world today? Is it possible to read texts for context if the values adumbrated in them do not take hold in society, or to study those that produce political communities that differ radically from those that emerged in eighteenth- and the nineteenth-century Europe?

The Future of Iran's Past is a critical study of the life and afterlife of Nizam al-Mulk (1018-92), celebrated Persian vizier and stalwart figure of power and authority in medieval Islamic society. He became the de facto ruler of a vast empire, with a final apotheosis as Islamic history's archetypal good vizier. Such was his standing among the glitterati of his era that he was considered an ideal replacement for the Abbasid caliph himself. As well as the outstanding figure in a long run of great viziers and administrators who dominated premodern Islamic politics, al-Mulk is remembered as the most prominent politician of the period to perceive new beginnings and radical departures. Neguin Yavari offers a close reading of al-Mulk's many legacies, revealing a complex imbrication of political and religious authority, as well as pre-Islamic and Islamic influences that have together shaped modern Iran. She shows that the new Iran of al-Mulk's singular vision, rather than a tale of uninterrupted Iranisation, is imbued with an extensive interplay of residual and emergent tendencies.