If you intend to listen to this audio file, I suggest reading the text below first.

For some time I have had the honour of taking part, alongside a group of friends, in book-reading and content-analysis sessions that these friends have organised. It is, in its own way, an accomplished and valuable undertaking.

The thematic focus of the sessions varies, but for a period we have decided to examine the works and ideas of Dr Seyyed Javad Tabatabai. As most of you know, Javad Tabatabai was a prominent scholar of Iranian history and political thought who died last year after years of research filled with love and commitment to the culture and thought of the Iranian lands.

The book under discussion is his History of Political Thought in Iran, one of his most important works.

In this chapter Tabatabai argues that after Islam, with the Arab conquest and the fall of the Sasanian Empire, three principal traditions emerged in the sphere of Iranian political thought:

1) First, a tradition of writing works on religious law and governance, which sought to derive political thought directly from the Qur’an, hadith, and jurisprudential texts.

2) Second, writers of siyasat-namehs, such as Khwaja Nizam al-Mulk, who attempted to combine pre-Islamic Iranshahri political thought with religious and Islamic texts.

3) Political philosophy, represented by al-Farabi, which attempted to derive political thought from philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophical methods—an undertaking that, in Tabatabai’s view, began and ended with al-Farabi and never developed into a continuing tradition in the political thought of the Iranian lands.

According to Tabatabai, it was Khwaja Nizam al-Mulk and his Siyasatnama that carried Iranshahri political thought forward in a way that had practical consequences, rather than al-Farabi, whose path never found continuity. This matters because what happens in this period gives birth to the political history of later centuries, ultimately leading to the decline of political thought in Iran.

In this short talk, I raise critiques and questions regarding Dr Tabatabai’s analysis, because I believe that the true carrier of Iranian thought is al-Farabi, not Khwaja Nizam al-Mulk. In fact, the path initiated by Nizam al-Mulk is, in my view, the very one that centuries later leads, as a natural result, to Safavid political thought and ultimately to the doctrine of velayat-e faqih.

Aydin Areta

YouTube:
https://youtu.be/qUniU0B78bw