Persianate Islam andthe Secularity of KingshipSaïd Amir Arjomand

In line with the conceptual framework of the “Multiple Secularities– Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” project,1 secularity here
is defined as the differentiation between the religious and the nonreligious through the drawing of symbolic boundaries. The scope ofsecularity changes as a result of divergent developmental paths of different cultural logics pertaining to different normatively autonomous
spheres or domains of life within each society/civilisation, and as a result of inter-civilisational encounters, notably the non-Western world’s
encounter with Western modernity and its conception of secularity.
Max Weber’s concept of a world region as a civilisational zone
(Kulturkreis) applies to the Persianate world in the Islamic era,
which was called Irānshahr2 (the land of Iran) already in the late
10th century.3 According to Abu Mansur Tusi, who wrote the earliest
known Epic of Kings in New Persian in the 10th century, Irānshahr“extends from the Oxus river to the Nile”. Weber also linked thisnotion of a world region to his seminal idea of the world religionsof salvation being the core around which civilisations grow. Marshall Hodgson (1974) followed Weber’s paradigm with reference
to Islam, but without adopting his term. In Hodgson’s conception,
Islamicate civilisation creates a world region, which he called Islamdom, in analogy to Christendom. And, whether or not he knew
it, Hodgson followed Abu Mansur in also defining the Islamicate
civilisation as extending from the Nile to the Oxus. Hodgson termed123

Weber: World religions
as core of civilisations

Hodgson: Islamicate
civilisation as a world
regionChristoph Kleine, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Research Programme of the
HCAS ‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’,” Working
Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond
Modernities” 1 (Leipzig, 2016).
Within this text, the transliteration system of the Journal of Persianate Studies isused for Persian and Arab terms.
Etymologically, this means the “empire of the Aryans”.
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1Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingshipthe cultural traditions that developed on the basis of the Persian
language “Persianate”, and further contrasted the continued vitalityof the ‘Persianate zone’ with the early flourishing of the ‘Arabic
zone’ of the Islamicate civilisation, going so far as to divide theArabic zone itself historically “into an earlier ‘caliphal’ and later‘Persianate’ phase.”4
New Persian as lingua franca
The New Persian was first written in the Arabic script towards theend of the 9th century. It quickly became the lingua franca of several
monarchies and empires, as well as the complementary lingua francaof Islam during its expansion in the Eastern Muslim land.5 The riseof local monarchies in the Iranian zone of the caliphal body politic, most notably the Samanids, switched their official language from
Arabic to Persian. The culture of the Persianate zone of the Islamicate
civilisation was made distinctive by two major components that inturn make their study distinctive: Persianate Islam and Persian kingship.
The most significant works in nascent Persian prose on Islam
under the Samanids were the Persian creed by the leading Hanafi
theologian, Abu Mansur Māturidi (d. 944), and the Great Commentary (Tafsir-e bozorg) on the Qur’an, which was wrongly attributed
to Mohammad b. Jarir al-Tabari (d. 923). These texts were publishedat the same time as the Persian translation of Tabari’s monumental
History of Prophets and Kings by the Samanid vizier, Abu ʻAli Balʻami(d. 974 or after 992),6 which, alongside a slightly earlier prose translation, paved the way for the later versifications of the Epic of Kings

4

5
6

2

Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle
Periods, vol. 2. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 293–94; SaïdAmir Arjomand, “HODGSON, MARSHALL GOODWIN SIMMS,” Encyclopædia
Iranica, online edition, originally published September 24, 2015, accessed June 19,
2019, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hodgson-marshall.
Bert G. Fragner, Die “Persophonie”: Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt in
der Geschichte Asiens (Persophonia—regionalism, identity, and language contacts
in the history of Asia) (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999).
These were both completed in the third quarter of the tenth century under
Mansur b. Nuh (961–76). Thus, from the very beginning, the Persianate variant of
the Islamicate civilisation combined the Persianisation of Islam with the revival of
Persian kingship.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship(Shāhnāma).7 Sufism did not take long to become the dominant feature of Persianate Islam, however.8
With the exposition of mystical concepts in the elegant Persian
prose of Khwāja ʻAbdallāh Ansāri (d. 1089) in Herat in the mid-11th
century, and the treatise on Sufism by his contemporary, Hojviri of
Ghazna in 1077,9 Persian replaced Arabic as the primary medium
for the expression of Sufism, the movement that had been gathering momentum for a century or two in Khorasan. Ansāri’s followers,
Rashid al-Din Maybodi (d. after 1126), Ahmad Ghazāli (d. 1126),and ʻAbd al-Karim Samʻāni (d. 1167) continued to write in Persianin the 12th century,10 as did ʻAyn al-Qozāt Hamadāni (d. 1131) andHakim Sanā’i of Ghazna (d. 1131). Sufism was thus incorporated into
Persianate Islam, and in fact became its new distinctive feature. Sufi
literary works in Persian presented a non-legalistic mystical variantof Islam. What is fascinating is that the Sufi-tinged Persianate Islam
travelled to India and was received as the central, universalistic tradition of Islam, and not as a form of “local knowledge”. New Persian
was forged from the beginning as the complementary lingua francaof Islam, and became, as Hodgson emphasised, the main vehicle forthe spread of Islam as a world religion and of the Islamicate civilisation in the “eastern lands of the Caliphate”.
The Rise of Samanid Kingship
Meanwhile a new type of Islamicate political regime was createdin 10th-century Khorasan and Transoxania by the Samanids, who
traced their descent from Bahram Chubin, the Parthian rebel against
the Sasanian Khosrow II in the 6th century. The new regime combined
the idea of Iranian monarchy with an entirely novel form of politicalorganisation, consisting of patrimonial government with a Mamluk army of royal slaves. Military slavery in the form of soldiers andSufism Persianate
Islam’s distinctive
featureNew regime combined
Iranian kingship withpatrimonial governmentSaïd Amir Arjomand, “Persianate Islam and its Regional Spread,” in Religions,
Nations and Transnationalism in Multiple Modernities, ed. Patrick Michel, Adam
Possamai, and Bryan S. Turner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
8 The Google Scholar entries I have mentioned in fact show big clusters on
Persianate Islam and its near equivalent, Persianate Sufism.
9 He is known as Hazrat-e Dātā Ganjbakhsh, and his shrine is Lahore’s foremost
sacred site of pilgrimage.
10 William C. Chittick, Divine Love. Islamic Literature and the Path to God (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2013).
7

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship

Persian kingship:
distinction ofreligious/spiritual andpolitical/temporal
domains
Prophecy and kingshipordained by God

generals who were owned (mamluk) by the patrimonial rulers who
soon claimed imperial kingship as King of Kings (shāhanshāh)emerged and developed in the Samanid kingdom, the prototypical“Persianate polity” credited with the revival of the Persian language
at the beginning of what the Indologist Sheldon Pollock called the
Vernacular Millennium.11 Its administrative structure fitted Weber’s
ideal type of patrimonialism. Weber also noted the propensity of
patrimonial regimes for mercenary and slave armies but did not built
it into his model and definition.
For the reception of monarchy in the Islamicate civilisation, however, we can go much further back in history to what Hodgson called
the caliphal phase of Islam when the ancient Persian idea of kingship,as Zakeri demonstrates in great detail, constituted the core of Persian
wisdom presented in Arabic garb.12 The reception of the Persian ideaof monarchy in the 8th and 9th centuries resulted in the distinctionof the religious/spiritual and the political/temporal domains withthe spread of what I have provocatively called the theory of the two
powers. According to this theory, which prevailed into the 20th century throughout the Muslim world, prophecy and kingship were thetwo powers ordained by God. Kings were considered necessary forthe maintenance of order in the world so that humankind could benefit from the divine guidance sent down by the prophets and thereby
attain salvation in the other world.13
The spread of Persian kingship
The Persianate polity as shaped in the Samanid kingdom was not
adopted by the Saljuq nomadic empire in the 11th century, despite
the recommendation of the great vizier Nezām al-Molk, who in fact
created his own personal Mamluk retinue. However, it was adopted
by the Ghurid rulers of present-day Afghanistan, who belonged to
the Iranian House of Shansab, in the latter part of the 12th century. At the beginning of the 13th century, the Persianate polity then4

11 Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Evolution of the Persianate Polity and its Transmission to
India,” Journal of Persianate Studies 2, no. 2 (2009).
12 Ali b. ‘Ubayda al-Rayhani and Mohsen Zakeri, Persian Wisdom in Arabic Garb
(Leiden: Brill, 2007).
13 Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Legitimacy and Political Organisation: Caliphs, Kings
and Regimes,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 4, ed. Robert Irwin(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingshiptravelled to India via the institution of royal military slavery. The
childless Ghurid Sultan, Mo‘izz al-Din, who conquered India at theend of the 12th century, expressed the notion of the military slaves
as sons of the king, and left his conquered subcontinent to his slavegenerals who perfected their distinctive political regime, the Delhi
Sultanate. In this period, which was marked by the Mongol invasionof Iran, just as Sufism was formed as a distinctly Persianate variant ofIslam and spread westward to Anatolia, Persianate kingship travelledalong with it. Najm al-Din Rāzi (d. 1256), fleeing the Mongol invasion under Chinggis Khan in the 1220s, wrote the first major treatise on kingship from the Sufi perspective, Mersād al-ʻEbād, which
included a mirror on the wayfaring (soluk) of kings. He was introduced by the great master of his Kobravi Sufi order, Shehāb al-Din`Omar Sohravardi (d. 1234), to the Seljuq Sultan of Rum, ‘Alā’ al-Din
Kayqobād (r. 1219–37), to whom he dedicated the treatise. Like his
predecessor and his successors, who commissioned Shāhnāmas andSeljuqnāmas modeled on Firdawsi’s Shāhnāma, ‘Alā’ al-Din Kayqobādbore the name of the ancient kings of Iran. Sufism and kingship as thetwo major ingredients of Persianate culture thus travelled together.
While the Mamluk army was the structural feature of the
Persianate body politic, its soul or core normative idea was ancient
Persian kingship. In keeping with this Persianate heritage, the Persian
bureaucrats of the Il-Khanid Mongolian Empire in Iran had, by theend of the 13th century, revived the Persian idea of kingship for the
benefit of their Mongolian masters as attested by the oldest illustrated
manuscripts of the Shāhnāma from this period.14 The ancient Persiankings’ divine charisma (farrah) was made transitive and spread to therealm of Iran, making it prosperous and luminous. Thus the goodnews of the ascension of Ghāzān, the first Il-Khanid ruler to convert toIslam, came from the heavens to earth: “That to the land of Iran (irānzamin) a king/shall be sent by God”, as the 14th-century bureaucrat

Main characteristics
of Persianate culture:
Sufism and kingship

Divine charisma ofancient Persian kings

14 The later Il-Khans, as is well known to art historians, promoted it by producing
lavishly illustrated manuscripts of Shāhnāma, and commissioned Hamdollah
Mostawfi to write their own supplementary epic of kings, Zafarnāma, which
devoted a larger number of verses to the kingship of Chinggis Khan and his
descendants than to that of either the Arabs or the Persians. In the elevenvolume edition of Zafarnāma published in Tehran, this occupies volumes 7–11
(2009/1388 onward). Mostawfi gives the theory of kingship a further Persianate
twist to link it inseparably to the land of Iran.
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5Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship

Persianate kingshipcrucial for contemporary
conceptions of secularity

Hamdallah Mostawfi put it. Similarly, through the justice of the last
Il-Khan, Abu Sa‘id, “all the realm of Iran (molk-e irān zamin) turned
to paradise”.15 This, incidentally, is the rebirth of the idea of Iran firstinvented in the Sasanian revolution.
I have identified Persianate kingship and Sufi Persianate Islam as
the main sources of the enormous sub-global growth and spread of
Persianate culture and society. Symbolic, literary and material forms
once generated by culture became autonomous and assumed livesof their own. Although Persianate monarchy is extinct and Sufism
severely debilitated, the Persianate conception of kingship at the apexof the secular, temporal domain has been decisive in the contemporary understanding of a secular sphere of life and the delimitationof its boundaries with the sacred, Iran’s current uniquely theocratic
regime notwithstanding.
Intellectual debates on secularity in the Islamic Republic of Iran
The decline and persecution of Sufism as a component of Islam under the Islamic Republic of Iran has in no way diminished its cultural
importance as it permeates classical Persian poetry that now occupies a prominent space in the secular cultural sphere. No one quotingSaʿdi, Mawlana (Rumi) or Hafez can in any way be considered to be
acting within the religious domain which has been strictly defined by
the theocratic regime. The speech of the most prominent and popular champion of the separation of religion and politics, Abdol-Karim
Sorush is full of the poetry of Mawlana in particular, and Mawlana’s
poetry also adds colour to the writings of the former reformist President of the IRI, Sayyed Mohammad Khatami.
The demise of monarchy did not diminish the conceptual secularity of the political sphere it once dominated either. In fact, it was
the Islamic intellectuals in the Islamic Republic of Iran who led thebreak with political Islam in the early 1990s themselves. In 1992, thelay Islamic intellectual, Sorush, made a radical break with his predecessor ʿAli Shariʿati’s revolutionary characterisation of Islam as an
ideology in a critique of the Islamic revolutionary ideology, arguingthat Islam as a world religion is “richer than (farbatar) ideology”.

6

15 For the citations, see Saïd Amir Arjomand, “State Formation in Early Modern
Muslim Empires: Common Origin and Divergent Paths,” Social Imaginaries 2,
no. 2 (2016).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship

An ideological society, he argued, stifles free enquiry and intellectual
development, whereas Islam as a world religion allows for a variety ofdifferent interpretations that open the road to intellectual creativity.
Sorush proceeded to advocate his idea of ‘Islamic secularism’ whichbore a striking resemblance to what Nurcholish Madjid had done inIndonesia some two decades earlier.16 At about the same time, thecleric Mohammad Mojtahed-Shabestari, replacing the now defunctkingship with the modern idea of democracy, rejected the fundamental premises of the regimes’ ‘political jurisprudence’ by arguingthat since the time of the Prophet, the fiqh was never constitutiveof political order and was always pragmatic and designed to answer
practical questions that arose within the framework of existing political regimes. The choice between political regimes was to be basedon reason and not religion. This appears to be an argument for thesecularity of the political domain as independent of religion andsubject to normative regulation by human reason and deliberation.
More generally, he proposed a hermeneutic approach to Islamic law
and religion. This led to the popularisation of the idea that different‘readings’ (singular, Qerā’at) of Islam were legitimate, a truly radical
conclusion for a Shiʿite cleric who had been elected to the first revolutionary parliament in 1980.
An equally radical break with 20th-century apologetic Islamic
modernism was made by Sorush in his advocacy of religious pluralism toward the end of the 1990s. Sorush said that there was notone (as suggested by the common reading of the opening chapter ofthe Qur’an) but many “straight paths” to salvation.17 Sorush backed
his project of de-ideologisation of Islam by upholding the traditional
separation of religion and politics, replacing the now defunct kingship with its modern substitute, namely democracy. To enhance
the separation of religion and politics, he also put forward a hasty

Sorush: Idea of “Islamic
Secularism”

Mojtahed-Shabestari:fiqh designed to answer
practical political

Different legitimate
readings of Islam

Sorush’s de-ideologisation of Islam: replacing
kingship with religious
democracy

16 Nurcholish Madjid had denounced the idea of the Islamic state (negara Islam) as
the sacralising of what is actually profane in Islam as early as 1970–71, but it was
not until the 1990s that his call for secularism and rejection of the ‘mythology’ of
the Islamic state was taken up by the younger generation of Islamic intellectuals
and thus became a major force in the movement for democratisation after the fallof Suharto. For the comparison, and for the references in this section, see SaïdAmir Arjomand, “Islamic Resurgence and Its Aftermaths,” in The New Cambridge
History of Islam, vol. 6, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
17 Abdolkarim Sorush, Serāthā-ye mostaqim (Straight Paths) (Tehran: Serāt, 1998).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingshipargument to justify secularism as the scientification and rationalisation of social and political thinking and maintained that Islam as areligion was inherently secular. In its original formulation, Sorush’s
assertion that Islam is inherently secular was highly ambiguous, if
not confused. However, he returned to the topic in the following
decade, attacking secularism as a new modern anti-religious religion, and criticising “secularist reason (ʿaql)” in a similar fashion tohis earlier attack on ideology in a number of articles. He drew on
Mawlana’s poetry, as he often does, to show the inadequacy of secularreason.18 Sorush’s revised position on secularism in contrast to secularity appeared in a volume he edited with Mojtahed-Shabestari on
Tradition and Secularism (Sonnat o sekularizm) which was conceived
as a part of the major intellectual debate in Iran around the turn ofthe century on the subject of tradition and modernity.19 In this reversal, he defended the distinction and autonomy of religion against the
intrusion of instrumental reason.

Khātami: rule by thepeople as ‘religious
democracy’

8

The advocacy of Islamic reform by Sorush and MojtahedShabestari paved the way for the movement for political reform
led by President Khātami (1997–2005), who gave currency to
Mojtahed-Shabestari’s principle of the acceptability of different‘readings’ of Islam and endorsed Sorush’s idea of ‘religious democracy’, presuming it to be compatible with the constitutionally
entrenched doctrine of the Mandate of the Jurist (vilāyat-e faqih).
Khātami argued that in Iran, where the majority of the population
are assumed to be religious, rule by the people would naturally
be ‘religious democracy’ (mardom-sālāri-ye dini). To support hisargument, Khātami was fond of referring to Tocqueville’s description of America in the first half of the 19th century as a model for
religious democracy. Khātami’s own contribution to the debate on
tradition and modernity, however, consisted of a book surveying Perso-Islamicate political thought critically to establish its justificationof arbitrary despotism and domination (as opposed to democracy).20
18 Abdolkarim Sorush, “Din o donya-ye jaded” and “Sekularizm,” in Sonnat osekularizm, ed. Abdolkarim Sorush, Mohammad Mojtahed-Shabestari, Mostafa
Malekiān and Mohsen Kadivar (Tehran: Serāt, 2002/1981).
19 Saïd Amir Arjomand, “The Reform Movement and the Debate on Modernity andTradition in Contemporary Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34,
no. 4 (2002).
20 M. Khātami, Ā’in va andisha dar dam-e khudkamāgi. Sayri dar andisha-ye siyāsi-

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship

He covered the Platonising adaptation of Greek political thinkers by
Perso-Islamicate medieval thinkers, followed by mirrors for princes. He stressed the “decline” of Islamicate political thought and theliterature on advice to the rulers almost from their inception! President Khātami was deeply influenced by his former colleague at the
ʿAllāma Tabātabā’i Center for the Study of Politics, Javad Tabataba’i,
in his choice of the topic of political thought and his highly critical
approach to it.
Javad Tabataba’i was a political philosopher and a staunch modernist and secularist. He considered self-criticism to be the first step
toward secular modernity and deplored its absence and the lack of
critical thinking among Iranian intellectuals, and Islamists in particular, regarding their cultural heritage. His remedy was to analyse
traditional Persian political culture critically in order to understandthe decline it had undergone as a part of the Islamic civilisation. In
a series of books published from the late 1980s onward, he wrote
about the irreversible decline (zavāl, enhetāt) of political thought inpre-modern Islamic Iran, arguing that epistemically it was incommensurate with modernity.21 His project was to recover pre-Islamic
Iranian political thought, which he called the “thought of Irānshar”
or “Iranianate thought (fekr-e Irānshahri),” and to examine it critically in order to restore and modernise it, while excluding Islam. Hismonograph on Nezām al-Molk (d. 1088) is particularly interesting
because it can be taken as a case study of the secularity of kingshipand the separation of traditional political thought from religion. In it,
Tabataba’i maintains that the great Nezām al-Molk – the vizier of thetwo most important rulers of the Greater Seljuq Empire and arguably
their best theorist on the thought of Irānshahr – recognised the irrelevance of the Caliphate and, by implication, religion to Sultanate ormonarchy and by extension to the (secular) political domain.22 Given

Tabataba’i: pre-modern
Islamic Iranian politicalthought to be recovered

ye musalmanān dar faraz va furudei tamaddon-e eslāmi (Creed and Thought in
the Trap of Arbitrariness. An Exploration of the Political Thought of the Muslims
through the Rise and Decline of Islamic Civilisation) (Tehran: Tarh-e Naw, 1999).
21 Notably, J. Tabataba’i, Darāmadi Falsafi bar Tārikh-e Andishah-ye Siyāsi dar Irān
(A Philosophical Introduction to the History of Political Thought in Iran) (Tehran:Kavir, 1993/1372); idem, Zavāl-e Andishah-ye Siyāsi dar Irān (Decline of PoliticalThought in Iran) (Tehran: Kavir, 1994/1373).
22 J. Tabataba’i, Khwāja Nezām al-Molk (Tehran: Nashr-e Naw, 1997/1375). Compare
also Neguin Yavari, The Future of Iran’s Past: Nizam Al-Mulk Remembered (Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
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9Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship

Tabataba’i’s understanding of the causes of the decline of the Islamic
civilisation, he was dismayed by the creation of a theocratic republicin Iran. Thus, the condition of decline was exacerbated by the intrusion of Islam into the political domain as a result of the Islamic revolution of 1979. It was therefore imperative to maintain the traditionof monarchy in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution. As he put it in
an interview, “Ayatollah Khomeini has forced the religious tradition
into a situation where it does not belong.”23
In short, in sharp contrast to the Islamist intellectuals, and lesssharp contrast to Islamic reformists like Sorush, Tabataba’i sought tobase the alternative modernity appropriate for Iran not on Islam but
on Iranianate thought. This clearly amounts to the greatest defianceof the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran and its grandiose de-differentiation of the political and the religious sphere by the obliterationof temporal monarchy. This defiance also implies an insistence on the
sharpest distinction of the religious and the political domains of life
and thus on the secularity of the political order.

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23 Ali Mirsepassi, “Democracy and Religion in the Thought of John Dewey,” chap.
5 in Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship

Quoted and Further Reading
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “The Reform Movement and the Debate on Modernity andTradition in Contemporary Iran.” International Journal of Middle East Studies
34, no. 4 (2002): 719–31.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Evolution of the Persianate Polity and its Transmission to
India.” Journal of Persianate Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 115–36.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Legitimacy and Political Organisation: Caliphs, Kings andRegimes.” In The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 4. Edited by Robert Irwin, 225–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Islamic Resurgence and Its Aftermaths.” In The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 6. Edited by Robert W. Hefner, 173–97. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “HODGSON, MARSHALL GOODWIN SIMMS,” Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition. Originally published September 24, 2015, accessed June 19, 2019. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hodgson-marshall.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “State Formation in Early Modern Muslim Empires: Common Origin and Divergent Paths.” Social Imaginaries 2, no. 2 (2016): 35–51.
Arjomand, Said Amir. “Persianate Islam and its Regional Spread.” In Religions, Nations and Transnationalism in Multiple Modernities. Edited by Patrick Michel,Adam Possamai, and Bryan S. Turner, 67–84. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017.
Chittick, William C. Divine Love. Islamic Literature and the Path to God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Fragner, Bert G. Die “Persophonie”: Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt in derGeschichte Asiens (Persophonia—regionalism, identity, and language contacts in
the history of Asia). Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999.
Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle
Periods, vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Khātami, M. Ā’in va andisha dar dam-e khudkamāgi. Sayri dar andisha-ye siyāsi-ye
musalmanān dar faraz va furudei tamaddon-e eslāmi (Creed and Thought in
the Trap of Arbitrariness. An Exploration of the Political Thought of the Muslims
through the Rise and Decline of Islamic Civilisation). Tehran: Tarh-e Naw, 1999.
Kleine, Christoph, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. “Research Programme of the HCAS
‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’.” Working Paper Series of the HCAS „Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 1, Leipzig, 2016.
Mirsepassi, Ali. “Democracy and Religion in the Thought of John Dewey.” Chap.
5 in Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair, 129–156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Rayḥānī, ‘ Alī ibn ‘ Ubaydah, and Mohsen Zakeri. Persian Wisdom in Arabic Garb:‘Ali b. ‘Ubayda al-Rayhani (D. 219/834) and His Jawahir al-Kilam wa-Fara’id
al-Hikam. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Sorush, Abdolkarim. Serāthā-ye mostaqim (Straight Paths). Tehran: Serāt, 1998.
Sorush, Abdolkarim. “Din o donya-ye jaded” and “Sekularizm.” In Sonnat o sekularizm. Edited by Abdolkarim Sorush, Mohammad Mojtahed-Shabestari, Mostafa Malekiān, and Mohsen Kadivar, 27–107. Tehran: Serāt, 2002/1981.
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1993/1372.

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Leipzig University – HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, 2019www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion

Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship

Tabataba’i, J. Zavāl-e Andishah-ye Siyāsi dar Irān (Decline of Political Thought inIran). Tehran: Kavir, 1994/1373.
Tabataba’i, J. Khwāja Nezām al-Molk. Tehran: Nashr-e Naw, 1997/1375.
Yavari, Neguin. The Future of Iran’s Past: Nizam Al-Mulk Remembered. Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Th is text is part of the Companion to the Study of Secularity. Th e intent of the Companion is to give scholars interested in the concept of Multiple Secularities, who are
not themselves specialists in particular (historical) regions, an insight into diff erent
regions in which formations of secularity can be observed, as well as into the key
concepts and notions with respect to the study of secularity.
It is published by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple
Secularities − Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”. For as long as the HCAS
continues to exist, the Companion will be published and further expanded on the
HCAS’ website. Towards the end of Multiple Secularities project, all entries will
be systematised and edited in order to transform the Companion into a completed
Open Access publication.
Please cite as:
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship.” In Companion to the Study of Secularity. Edited by HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond
the West, Beyond Modernities.” Leipzig University, 2019. www.multiple-secularities.de/media/css_arjomand_persianatekingship.pdf

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Leipzig University – HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, 2019www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion