The Persian Prince: The Rise and Resurrection of an Imperial Archetype By Hamid Dabashi

The impressive continuity of ideals of rulership displayed in various premodern genres, like epical literature, chronologies, or advice texts for rulers, spanning from India to the Mediterranean Basin, has been frequently observed. The spatial and temporal dissemination of regal prototypes depicts a fascinating and colourful landscape of premodern societies linked through a transcultural flow of ideas and images. Yet, as long as this floating repertoire of political ideas has no name or origin story, it feels epistemologically isolated and empty. In his latest book, The Persian Prince: The Rise and Resurrection of an Imperial Archetype, Hamid Dabashi engages in the daring exercise of not only assigning a name and place of birth to these kaleidoscopic ideas but also of extending their story to the present. Dabashi introduces the Persian Prince, an archaic Iranian archetype, ‘as a historical fact and a heuristic device, as a metonymic allegory of a mode of political thinking’ (p. xiv). Throughout, Dabashi traces the Persian Prince through its ‘varied historic gestations, from ancient Persia to the Hebrew Bible to classical Greek antiquity to medieval European mirrors for princes to its Renaissance resurfacing in modern political thought down to its post-colonial resurrection as a rebel, a prophet, a poet, and a nomad’ (p. xiii). He identifies the Persian Prince in a variety of sources, from the Talmud and the Midrash to medieval ethical literature, poetry, and philosophy, as well as European paintings and operas from the Renaissance to the modern era.

His Persian Prince, which has no gender and is culturally syncretic, symbolizes a mode of political thinking manifested in ancient kings and prophets, postcolonial rebels/poets, and post-national/nomadic artists. In fact, Dabashi imagines the Persian Prince from the outset as always both a ruler and a rebel, before eventually splitting under colonial duress. The author also stresses that the Persian Prince was not ‘a monolithic proposition of state legitimacy but a contested domain of engagement with what is just and beautiful’ (p. 109). While this distinction is crucial, as it sets up the later gestations of the Persian Prince outside the court, oddly it is just mentioned in passing. The first major metamorphosis that the Persian Prince undergoes occurs amid the demise of the last Muslim empires (Mughals, Safavids, Ottomans) and the rise of European colonialism. To illustrate this transformation, Dabashi draws on two contrasting readings of Machiavelli’s The Prince: Antonio Gramsci’s allegorical conception of the Prince as a political party and Ernst Cassirer’s perspective on the Florentine masterpiece as a theoretical exploration of the division between the state and its interests and the commonweal. Guided by this comparative move we get to observe the Persian Prince’s departure from the imperial courts that had been either rendered obsolete or were compromised by colonial influence, followed by their reappearance in the public sphere in the form of rebellious poets/literati like Fatemeh Qorrat al-Ayn, Muhammad Iqbal, and Nima Yooshij. Their revolutionary visions and prophetic voices defined and spread throughout a public space that knew no national borders and covered the entire region. Their dissemination in the nineteenth century was aided by the emergence of the printing machine and periodicals, the simplification of Persian and Arabic prose, and the rise of literary genres, like travelogues.

For the final gestation of the Persian Prince, Dabashi turns—in yet another adaptation of European philosophy for the postcolonial condition—to Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of the nomadic subject as an entirely de-territorialized reconceptualization of the human existence. What Braidotti had missed, as Dabashi emphasizes, is that this condition of nomadic subjectivity, typical of the advanced capitalist world, was experienced long before by the subjects of colonialism that were objectified and made knowable by and to Europeans. Dabashi finds evidence of this nomadic subjectivity in what he calls ‘renegade texts’, from José Martí’s ‘Our America’ to Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi and Edward Said’s Orientalism. De-territorialized and without identity, the Persian Prince roams the by now amorphous, globalized Persianate world, resurrected in the figure of the postcolonial poetic persona, the stateless labourer and refugee.

Dabashi’s proposition of the Persian Prince carries explicit criticism of what he sees as a lopsided focus on political theories from Arabic legal and juridical texts in the study of Islamic political thinking. As a result, the philosophical, ethical, and literary contributions to Islamic political culture originating from the Indian, Persian, and Ottoman traditions are mostly ignored, or worse, read ‘abusively’ outside of their literary and historic context. When courtiers summoned the Persian Prince from their ‘literary abode’ by (re-)telling their mythic, heroic, or historical exploits, they aimed, Dabashi proposes, to inform political culture and offer a prototype of rulership and a mode of historiography. Few would argue with Dabashi’s championing of the Iranian component of Islamic historiography, as testified by the recent, expanding scholarship on the Persianate world that he refers to. And while his emphasis on the role of literature in the formation of political discourse and the performative affirmation of ideals of rulership is most welcome, his claim that the mirrors for princes were ‘put into practice’ (p. 90) glosses over the intricacies of the production, performance, and reception at court of these astonishingly discursive and polyvalent texts, of which we still know so little.

The enduring influence of the political concepts and archetypes of the archaic Persian empires on the region’s political culture is indisputable. By stressing the multiplicity of voices, places, and centres that characterize his vision of the Persianate world, Dabashi aims to distance the Persian Prince from nationalist proclivities of Iranian historiography. However, while he deftly follows the trajectory of this archetype across various manifestations of political authority within the successors of the ancient Persian empires, a nuanced consideration of the interchangeable, fluid, and discursive nature of the attributions of origins, authority, or authorship of ideas and motifs would have made for a more rounded picture. In other words, it might have been worth asking whether the Persian Prince was as much continuously ‘Persianized’ as it was Persian in origin. Of course, this is not only a question of the balance between the continuing impact of the archetype’s ideational origin and the specific exigencies, material and otherwise, of later societies that adapted it for their needs. It is also a question about how we understand and define certain phenomena, such as forms of rulership or the genre of mirrors for princes, in order to draw continuities as perennial and bold as those projected by Dabashi.

These minor oversimplifications aside, The Persian Prince is a fascinating read that effectively portrays the impressive history of an idea over a span of roughly five millennia. At times verbose, but consistently imaginative and inspiring, Dabashi combines passages from Jewish canonical texts with murals in Ottoman coffee-houses depicting heroic scenes from the Shahnameh as well as paintings and operas showcasing the Persophilia of European political culture to show the adaptivity and ubiquity of a floating repertoire of political ideals. While more evidence on the various elements of this repertoire would have been welcomed, the book’s focus rather lies on the development of a theory that extends the well-known history of premodern transcultural regal prototypes into the (post)colonial era. By defining the Persian Prince as an engagement with justice rather than merely a form of rulership, Dabashi allows this archetype to outlive the demise of the imperial courts, and himself to shine light on the public space of the postcolonial societies as the creative hub in which visionary and revolutionary recastings and actualizations of mythic, heroic, and historical figures and ideals took shape. While the book contains little new information for the (literary) historian of the premodern Middle East, it is an inspiring exercise of postcolonial cultural history that suggests a way of theorizing how perennial ideals and modes of (political) thinking travel and shift forms, while continuing to inform political culture in postcolonial societies.