This will be an important and even path-breaking book on Muslim political thought, one that is conceptually sophisticated and rigorous in its scholarship.
Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, author of, inter alia, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Hurst) Advice for the Sultan is a startlingly fresh exploration of the interconnectedness of classical and early medieval mirrors for ... Read moreprinces, and a subtle reconstruction of context from text, to reveal the "hidden political messages" that lie at the heart of Nizam al-Mulk's higher purpose.
John Gurney, Wadham College, Oxford This novel reading of the rich and complex tradition of political thought offers the intriguing experience of discovering how common values, intentions and judgments connect contemporary political horizons with the Islamic past.
Stefan Leder, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Martin Luther University and Director of the Orient-Institut Beirut This is an important and stimulating re-examination of the enormous range of royal Advice literature in the pre-modern Middle East. Neguin Yavari makes a convincing case for a new, nuanced contextual approach. This marks a signal contribution to the study of the history of Islamic political thought.
Antony Black, Emeritus Professor, Politics and International Relations, University of Dundee [This] is an admirably thorough account of the [Islamicate] advice literature that the author has studied for years, but is outstanding and relevant well beyond its field in its attempts to rethink how intellectual history outside of the West should be pursued. ... Yavari ... explores the texts' rhetorical strategies to get at the thought behind them. By engaging robustly with structure and rhetoric across centuries of material, she offers a compelling portrait of a tradition of political philosophy and its forms of literary expression, providing an unprecedented synthetic analysis of what authors within this tradition were trying to convey to their readers. She strikes the right balance of historical contextualisation with rhetorical analysis, providing a model for how we might approach other pre-modern systematic disciplines such as philology, which map awkwardly onto modern academic disciplines.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Show Less