Introduction

ʿAlī Ibn Razīn, an author in early twelfth-century Mosul, narrates the story of a man, a commoner, who wished to buy a book solely because he had heard that it was popular with ‘a king of our time’. So desperate was the man to purchase a copy that he went to the extremity of selling items of his clothing to raise the necessary funds. The man acquired the book, which, Ibn Razīn adds, was useless to him. But the efforts to which he had gone to obtain it left him famished and exposed during two nights of extreme cold, and as a result of these privations he contracted a long illness. Ibn Razīn relates this account in order to impress upon his intended reader, a king, the importance of keeping his reading matter secret. It was essential to good governance that the king's affairs should remain hidden from his subjects, and this necessity for secrecy extended to the contents of the king's library.

The present study concerns a tenth-century Arabic book that is both for and about kings. Its author, who expresses firm opinions regarding their appropriate and inappropriate reading matter and much else besides, doubted that its intended recipient would welcome it. Indeed, whether this book, an unusually pointed ‘mirror for princes’ or work of advice for a ruler, ever reached the king's ear is unknown. Several other details are likewise unknown or uncertain, since the author of the book suppressed both his own name and that of his imagined reader. At some point in its transmission, however, this mirror for princes acquired an illustrious attribution, which doubtless accounted in significant measure for its survival.

The mirror for princes in question is the Naṣīḥat al-mulūk (‘Counsel for Kings’) attributed to the renowned scholar, jurist and polymath Abū l-Oasan ʿAlī b. Muaammad b. Oabīb al-Māwardī (364–450/ 974–1058). Available in three editions, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk has also been translated into Turkish.