Most Islamic mirrors for princes rest not on projected Utopias but on examples from the past. They draw upon a fund of wisdom attributed to ancient Greek and Persian as well as Muslim sages, and for all their differences of format, their guiding precepts are often expressed in ‘strikingly similar terms’. Yet, as Louise Marlow concludes, in the most recent and wide-ranging survey of Islamic advice literature:

Relevance to specific circumstances applies regardless of the language of composition of a piece of advice literature and of the linguistic politics surrounding it, which are not always easy to interpret. Thus Arabic was the Islamic language which first received the freight of ancient wisdom from the peoples conquered in the first/seventh century, and this freight passed back to, and was shared with, Persian, when the latter re-emerged as a language of high culture in the fourth/ tenth century.