Recent developments in Europe and the United States (US) attest to an increasing fascination with and nostalgia for the strong leaders of the past – especially those that emerged in the aftermath o...

Miskawayh on the purposes of historiography

Evil lords, benign historians: strongman politics in medieval India and Renaissance Florence

A bstr Act The view that some or all of the Khazars, a central Asian people, converted to Judaism at some point during the ninth or tenth century is widely accepted. A careful examination of the sources, however, shows that some of them are pseudepigraphic, and the rest are of questionable reliability. Many of the most reliable contemporary texts that mention Khazars say nothing about their conversion, nor is there any archaeological evidence for it. This leads to the conclusion that such a conversion never took place.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.2979/jewisocistud.19.3.1.pdf

Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism

This essay proposes a novel interpretation of the Fatāwā-i Jahāndārī (Precepts of world rulership), one of the major sources of Indo-Islamic political thought produced by Ziyā' al-Dīn Baranī, a seminal Indo-Islamic political theorist and historian (fourteenth century). It shows that one of the main thrusts of Baranī's theory is to offer a comprehensive account of the various kinds and manifestations of emergencies and modes of treating the diseases afflicting the body politic. It also investigates the ways in which Baranī's ideas on emergencies relate to the political circumstances that prevailed during the Delhi Sultanate period as well as to previous works of political and moral advice, particularly Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī's Nasirean Ethics . In addition, this essay is the first systematic endeavor to place Barani in conversation with Western political writers, especially Niccolo Machiavelli. It explores the affinities between these two authors' views on emergencies and, more broadly, on the challenges associated with rulership and the qualities requisite for an efficient ruler. My analysis of Baranī's ideas within the context of the Islamic tradition and the cross-cultural comparison with Machiavelli highlights the normative dimensions of his theory and its relevance to current debates on emergencies.

Miskawayh on the purposes of historiography

Citations

Evil lords, benign historians: strongman politics in medieval India and Renaissance Florence

Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism

Indian Emergencies: Baranī's Fatāwā-i Jahāndārī, the Diseases of the Body Politic, and Machiavelli's accidenti

Müslüman tari̇h felsefesi̇

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