This paper seeks to advance the existing scholarship on Persian secretary and belles-lettrist, ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 139/757) and his Risāla fī ’l-Ṣaḥāba (Epistle Concerning the Entourage). It argues that the Risāla, addressed to the second Abbasid caliph al-Manṣūr, set out to tackle the political ills of the caliphate, especially the crisis of political legitimacy. As the first documented articulation of the Islamic polity, the Risāla made a series of recommendations, including a proposal for legal codification that attempted to reinvent the caliphate by reuniting the institution's political and legal authority at the expense of private jurists (fuqahāʾ). The paper illustrates how Ibn Muqaffaʿ’s solution relied on a creative integration of Iranian and Islamic ideas of statecraft and legitimate rule. Ironically, this creative integration may have played a part in the Risāla’s failure to garner necessary support to effect change.
The fate of secular sciences in Islamic civilization has been the object of intense historical investigation. Historians have long sought to explicate the seemingly mysterious reduction of knowledge production in late medieval Islam. The present article attempts to grapple with this phenomenon by focusing on the social elements of knowledge production at the local, rather than the global level. It argues that the transmission of ancient knowledge to medieval Islam depended largely on a close cooperation among historical agents, who sought to advance various interests. The ultimate reduction of knowledge production—commonly referred to as the “decline” of sciences—was brought about by intense rivalry and the increased tension between different forms of knowledge and their representatives, which in turn hampered patterns of cooperation. The article stresses the contingent nature of the social relations that gave rise to the “decline” of sciences: the configuration of social agents, their interactions, and the final outcomes were not bound to unfold the way they did, nor did they have to follow the same path that led to emergence of modern Western science.
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