Download PDF | A Mirror for Princes, the Qābūs Nāma, by Kai Kā'ūs ibn Iskandar, Prince of Gurgān. London: Cresset Press, 1951.
289 Pages
INTRODUCTION
THE Qdbis-ndma is described by its author as a guide intended to warn his favourite son and destined successor against the pitfalls on life’s journey and to direct him in the path likely to lead to the greatest benefits. In essence it combines the functions of popular educator, manual of political conduct and text book of ethics, with expediency as its motto. The author declares at the outset that it contains the distilled essence of his own life’s experience, set down when he was sixty-three years of age; if his advice does not receive the attention it deserves from the beloved son to whom it is addressed—and the author is not sanguine that it will—someone destined for felicity in this world and the next will doubtless be found to take advantage of it. In any event he himself will have fulfilled his duty as a father in proffering it. He gives the date of composition as the year 475 of the Hijra, corresponding to A.D. 1082.
Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar ibn Qabis ibn Washmgir, the author, belonged to the princely dynasty of the Ziyārids, who held sway in the South Caspian provinces of Gilan, Tabaristan (Mazandaran) and Jurjan (or Gurgin). The first member of the dynasty to gain power was a certain Mardawij ibn Ziyar, whose name is said to be an arabicised form of the Persian mard-Gwiz, i.e. ‘“The Man-hanger’’. The biographer Yaqiit (A.D. 1179-1229), a Greek by birth, who in his childhood was sold as slave to a Baghdad merchant, tells how Mardawij, on attaining to the kingship, had a throne of pure gold constructed for himself, upon which he seated himself with the declaration that he was another King Solomon and that his Turkish slaves, of whom he had purchased a great horde, were the demons, over whom he held mastery. His treatment of them was in fact so brutal as to goad them into secret revolt, and they did him to death on an occasion when he was taking his ease in the hammam.
His most influential subjects, members of the Dailamite tribe, chose his brother Washmgir to succeed him; but his reign was disturbed by twenty years of war against the neighbouring Buwaihid princes, at one time Ziyirid vassals. Peace was declared in the reign of his son Behistiin, who gave one of his daughters in marriage to a Buwaihid princeling. Washmgir himself, like his brother before him, met a violent end, and for the same reasons, his cruelty and harshness having driven his slave-soldiery to conspire against him. They one day, in the depth of winter, compelled his son Minuchihr to seize and imprison him in a fortress, where they left him to freeze to death, without clothes or other covering.
To him there succeeded his son Qābūs, a famous character whom the author of the present work, his grandson, appears to have venerated and from whom, seemingly, the work derives its title. This Qabiis, we are informed by Y&qiit, was a mixture of fierce and cruel warrior and accomplished man of letters. He was a skilled Arabist, wellread in philosophy and astronomy, a poet and patron of poets, a prolific correspondent and generally well-versed in the arts of his time.
Yet he displayed his inherited traits by putting to death the officers of his bodyguard one by one until hardly any were left, A conspiracy among his troops drove him into exile for a period of eighteen years, after which he managed to collect a force strong enough to regain possession of the throne for him. Finally, however, he was assassinated and his body carried to Jurjin. His coffin was placed in a lofty tower-tomb which he had himself erected and which is still standing.
Robert Byron, in his Road to Oxiana, repeats a legend that Qabiis was placed in a crystal coffin which was suspended by chains midway between roof and floor of the tomb. That legend, however, is merely a repetition of one originally . told of the Prophet Daniel’s tomb by Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled in the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean in the years between A.D. 1166 and 1171. When speaking of Khūzistān the Rabbi says: ‘‘In the midst of its ruins is Shushan the capital, the site of the palace of King Ahasuerus. The river Tigris divides the city and the bridge connects the two parts . . . On the one side where the Jews dwell is the sepulchre of Daniel . . . In the course of time [the Sultan] Sinjar Shah came to this place and [seeing the rivalry between the Jews and the other inhabitants for the possession of the Prophet’s coffin, which brought prosperity] he said, ‘I command you to take the coffin of Daniel and place it inside another coffin of crystal and to suspend this from the middle of the bridge by a chain of iron’.”’
Kai Ka’iis clearly admired his grandfather despite the very obvious defects in his character, which he does not attempt to extenuate and some of which it is quite possible that he shared himself; for in view of his gospel of expediency, he is unlikely to have had any scruples about removing from his path anyone who stood in his way. He says as much in Chapter XX, where he urges his son not to neglect his duty
1 Benjamin of Tudela, ed. M. N. Adler, Oxford 1907, pp. 51f. I am indebted for the reference to Professor V. Minorsky.
aiik an 6" peed wits” demands the shedding of ned.
And here a word of caution may not be out of place. With expediency always his first consideration, his words cannot be regarded as containing the ideals or ideas of all Persians, still less of all Muslims. Indeed, they no more reflect official Islamic doctrine and ethical theory than Machiavelli’s Prince or Lord Chesterfield’s Letters those of Christianity. Yet the normal and customary exhortations are not lacking in the work, and in the passage describing his views of noblesse oblige, the author rises to a very great height. And, in general, he appears anxious to impress upon his son the necessity for living the life of a good Muslim.
In its mixture of the ideal and the practical the Qdabusndma reflects standards prevailing in official life in the East to this day, the essence being succinctly stated in a passage in Sir Charles Lyall’s Life of Warren Hastings, published in 1889. “‘There is no such school for practical politics’’, says he, “‘as Asia, where the good old rule of taking and keeping still prevails side by side with the most solemn and laudable precepts of justice and virtue; and where inconsistencies between acts and axioms trouble no one.” It may not be devoid of significance that the India Office Library’s manuscript copy of the Qabis-ndma bears the autograph signature of Warren Hastings.
Although the author of that work urges his son to be observant in his faith, his family had probably not long been converted to it, the provinces bordering on the Caspian Sea having been among the last in Persia to accept Islam. As late as A.D. 912 we read how Hasan ibn ‘Ali, the ‘‘Great Missioner’’, invited the inhabitants of Tabaristan and Dailam, of whom some were idolaters, others Magians, to become Muslims. By no means all responded, and records of the year 394/1003 show that the poet Abu’l-Hasan, a native of the Dailamite province who had been a fire-worshipper, was only then received into the new faith. In the early stages of the Muslim conquest, it would appear that it was chiefly the members of noble families who accepted the religion of the invaders, for material as well as other reasons. A good example is that of the Barmecides (Barmakids). The name Barmak was originally, says the traveller and historian Mas‘iidi1, a title borne by the High Priest of the great Magian fire-temple at Naw Bahar in Bactria. But his descendants, down to the destruction of the family by Hārūn alRashid, proudly retained the name of Barmecides.
The spirit of ancient Iran refused to die with the coming of Islam ; it merely took on the colouring of the new faith and its observances. In a land where life was, and is, particularly full of uncertainties, the doctrines preached by Muhammad did not to everyone’s satisfaction solve the problem of good and evil which had long been argued there. Professor E. G. Browne, in one of his lectures, declared that Pessimism had been_one of the chief influences in the evolution of most of the religions and philosophies of Persia and that hardly anywhere had so much thought been devoted to the problem of the nature and origin of Evil. ‘“The old dilemma that the Creator, if He could have prevented the appearance of Evil in the universe, and did not do so, cannot be All-Good, while if He wished to prevent it, but could not, He cannot be All-Powerful, has troubled the Persian more than it troubles the European mind.”
The two pre-Muhammadan religions which originated or developed in Iran, namely Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, certainly recognise two independent and hostile powers in
1 Murdj al-Dhahab, ‘‘Prairiesd’Or’’, ed, Barbier de Meynard, iv, pp. 47.
the universe, struggling for supremacy ; whereas primitive Islam hardly regarded it as a problem, since Allah was AllKnowing as well as All-Powerful. In the utterances of Kai Ka’ iis there is neither speculation nor judgment about good or evil. He shows himself influenced by the feeling pervading all Persian literature that life is transitory and that
“‘the end and aim of all human activity is death and departure from the world’’. There is also present the old [ranian conception of an inexorable fate ruling the world. But it is incalculable as well as inexorable, and brings good as well as evil. The wise man therefore will suffer its decrees passively and with equanimity. The author advises his son to await what the heavens may send with shoulders braced and mouth open, and so be ready either for blows or titbits.
It is here if anywhere that some parallel is to be found with Lord Chesterfield’s counsels to his son, although the polished Englishman’s lucubrations were characterised by Dr Johnson as teaching the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master, while there is a good deal that is genuine in the medieval Persian warrior, who advised what he thought good for success in living regardless of conventional ethics.
The world in which he existed was politically in a state of flux, with life uncertain and hard. Some of his territory, sloping northwards down to the Caspian Sea, was fertile, but much was covered with forest, while most of the eastern part was barren desert. All was liable to Turcoman invasions, which have been endemic throughout Persian history, and he himself, as a vassal of the Seljuq Turkish Sultans, was burdened by payment of tribute, These Seljuqs were a zadek marauding family of warriors, who appeared on the Persian scene from Central Asia at a time when the Abbasid Caliphate, with its capital at Baghdad, had lost all temporal power. They had themselves been newly converted to Islam and by over-running Persia, Mesopotamia,
Syria and Asia Minor, they gave unity to a great stretch of territory which had long been without it. With the zeal of converts they stiffened the wavering faith of the original inhabitants of those lands and so combined them that they were able to drive back the Byzantines, who had been creeping back on to their ancient territories and were in part recovering them. The Seljuq efforts “‘bred up a generation of fanatical Muhammadan warriors, to whom, more than to anything else, the Crusades owed their repeated failure’’.* Gibbon describes with apparent satisfaction the overthrow,
in A.D. 1071 at Malazkerd or Manzikert, of the Byzantine forces, which were made up ‘‘of the subjects and allies of Europe . . . and, above all, the mercenary and adventurous bands of French and Normans. Their lances were commanded by the valiant Ursel of Baliol, the kinsman or father of the Scottish kings’’.
Socially, the world which the book describes was a man’s world and the general picture of life in it that of a small town lying in the midst of agricultural land, on which many of the town’s inhabitants were employed and from which they returned to sleep at home in the evening. Distinctions of class were recognised, but the divisions between them were extremely tenuous and easily broken through. Indeed the social circumstances revealed in the book do not greatly differ from those described in James Morier’s Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, where a man might by his efforts raise himself from slavery to princedom and be cast by his evil
i5, Lane-Poole: Muhammadan Dynasties, s.v. Seljuks.
star from ‘is height of prope into Te depths of penury and ignominy, and where all things were possible.
This is not to say that all achieved equality or had the same kind of privileges open to them. Only men belonging to princely families, for example, or men destined for the learned professions, received or attained by their own efforts any formal education. Our author for one appears to have been instructed in the arts regarded as suitable for acquisition by a man of good family in his time, and almost certainly acquired others by himself. Although it is unlikely that he would have burdened himself with the task of setting down his work in writing, for which he probably employed a scribe, the consistent style of the whole indicates the hand of a single accomplished author, with possibly some additions in the way of anecdotes borrowed from other sources, whether Persian or foreign.
In the course of his reading and instruction, or in conversation with savants who resided at his father’s court, he doubtless learnt much of the religious and philosophical lore of his land and faith, and since Islamic tradition is filled with reminiscences of the stories in the Old and New Testaments, it need not surprise us to come across such a story as that of the youth Fath, who found loaves floating down to him on the Tigris. It is a characteristically naive illustration of the behest to ‘‘Cast thy bread upon the waters’’ (Ecclesiastes, xi, 1).
It is similarly at second hand that the author would have had any knowledge of the Greek classics, which some of his instructors might well have read in translation. Not all the Greek classics, it must however be said, but rather the works of the philosophers and doctors. Among the lands of the Near East, Syria and Mesopotamia had come under the influence of Greek learning and science in the days of Alexander the Great and his successors. Propagation of such learning was encouraged still further by the Byzantine rulers, whose efforts were greatly helped by Christianity. Monks in Syrian monasteries engaged in translating sacred books from Greek to Syriac, but did not confine themselves merely to works of ecclesiastical interest; philosophy and science in all its branches also engaged their minds. When, in the fifth century, the Nestorians expelled from the Byzantine empire took refuge in scattered communities in Mesopotamia and Iran, they founded special schools in which Greek medicine and other sides of ‘‘philosophy’’ were taught. The most famous of these schools was one, established at Gunday Shapiir, some little distance to the north of Ahwaz, which was in existence as late as the time of the Caliph Mansir (A.D. 754-775), grandfather of Hariin al-Rashid.
The work of propagating Greek science was carried a stage further when Christians and Jews engaged in translating texts from the intermediate Syriac form into Arabic. With the establishment of the Caliphate at Baghdad, such learning and activity was greatly encouraged, so that Greek philosophy and science became widespread wherever Muslim savants were to be found. And, in this context, it is to be borne in mind that Arabic was as much the language of learning in the Muhammadan world as Latin that of learning in medieval Europe. Men of Persian culture, though not always of Iranian stock, eagerly absorbed the new learning, and the names of Rhazes and al-Farabi, who flourished in the ninth century A.D., and Avicenna, who died in A.D. 1037, bear witness to the competency with which they handled it.
Avicenna at one period of his career had Qābūs ibn Washmgir as his patron and would have remained with him had not the prince been exiled. There were numerous similar courts of the kind, which sprang up all over Persia as the Caliphate declined and local spirit and patriotism began to assert itself. The most famous, perhaps, was that of Mahmiid of Ghazna, where many a poet and learned scholar was kept as a guest, honoured but often unwilling, to add lustre to the monarch’s name. Had the poet Firdawsi not escaped this would-be patron’s clutches in time, his great epic recounting the legends of Iran’s pre-Muslim heroes and heroines would probably never have survived, at least in its present form.
It was the work of such men as these, locally encouraged, which achieved national fame. What commanded a market best, however, was laudatory verse, much of which, perhaps too much, has survived. Essays and belles lettres were a comparatively late development, and not having a specifically personal appeal were always of rare occurrence. In the period more or less contemporary with our author, only three works in that class having any merit are known, the Qabiis-nama being the earliest. Of the others, one is the Siydsat-ndma, or ‘*Treatise on Government’’, of the Nizam al-Mulk, the famous vizier of the Great Seljuqs whom legend connects with Omar Khayyam and who died by the hand of an Assassin envoy in 485/1092-3. The second was the ‘*Four Discourses’’ (on Secretaries, Poets, Astrologers and Physicians) of Nizimf ‘the Samarqandi Prosodist’, who flourished in the first half of the twelfth century A.D. and was personally acquainted with Omar Khayyam.
Manuscripts of the original Persian text of all three works are rare, but Charles Schefer published the text of the Siydsat-ndma, with a French translation, in 1891, and Mirza Muhammad Qazwini and Professor Browne respectively the text and English translation of the ‘“‘Four Discourses’, under the auspices of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial (1910, 1921). The Trustees of the same Memorial in the early part of the present century entrusted the work of editing the Persian text of the Qabiis-ndma to the late Mr Edward Edwards of the Oriental Department of the British Museum, but he was prevented from making any more than a beginning by pressure of other work and the onset of serious illness.
It may be asked why such works as these are not better, and more generally, known. Pure chance may have been one reason, rarity of texts—due to destruction wrought by the Tartar hordes under Chingiz Khan’s subordinates—another (preferred by Persians), and still another that between the seventeenth century, when Persian studies are first heard of in this country, and the beginning of the nineteenth, the main concern of scholars was with Biblical literature. With the more secular outlook of the nineteenth century, when Persian literature began to be studied for its own sake, in the first instance by men who were, or had been, in contact with the Mogul Empire or its successors, the first task of scholars was seen to be the deliverance from obscurity or oblivion of the great numbers of works which lay buried in manuscript.
Scholars therefore devoted themselves to cataloguing, the accumulations in European and Asiatic libraries and only ' very slowly began to engage in the arduous, and, from the point of view of earning a living, unremunerative task of editing and publishing the texts that were being demanded. Since these were for the benefit of learned fellow-workers in the same field, translations were deemed unnecessary— possibly even inexpedient sometimes. Ordinarily too, it was the poetical literature, steeped in mysticism, which attracted, rather than the prose, much of which dates from times when Mongol, Turkish and Indian authors were imposing their own intricate and flowery patterns on the basic simplicity of Persian.
It remains to say that the princeling Gilanshah, for whom the Qabis-ndéma was composed, was the last ruling member of his line. After a reign of seven years he was overthrown by Hasan-i Sabbah (the Old Man of the Mountains of whom, and of whose successors, the Crusaders stood later so much in dread) in the year 483 of the Hijra, i.e. A.D. 1090-1.
REUBEN LEVY
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق