Cosmopolitanism, Poetry, and Kingship: The Ideal Ruler in Sanāʾī’s (d. 1131 or 1135 CE) Poetry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the vision of ideal rulership expressed in the works of the court poet Sanāʾī (d. 1131 or 1135) by highlighting the dialogue of his works with various genres of medieval literature: Sunni and Shiʿite metaphysics, mystical writings, mirrors for princes, pious maqāmāt, and court poetry. This dissertation highlights how the politicization of Islamic mysticism that occurred during the eleventh and twelfth centuries was manifested in that era’s court poetry. In doing so, it calls for scholarly attention to the intersection of Islamic mysticism and political theory in court-patronized works composed by non-Sufi authors.This dissertation investigates Sanāʾī’s engagement with the literary and intellectual milieu of his time through the lens of his portrayal of an ideal ruler. This engagement, first, informs Sanāʾī’s interdisciplinary approach to Islamic theories of governance; second, it enables him to cross-fertilize the substance, language, and rhetorical features of other literary genres with Persian court poetry; third, it defines the politics of his poetry. After contextualizing Sanāʾī in his literary and intellectual milieu, this dissertation will analyze his Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqah (‘The Garden of Truth’), the Sayr al-ʿibād (‘The Journey of [God’s] Servants’), and poems from his Dīvān (‘Collection of Poems’). It argues that Sanāʾī’s poetry had two roles: it served as propaganda for his patron, the Ghaznavid ruler Bahrāmshāh (r. 1117-1157) and was used by Sanāʾī as a podium from which he promoted himself as a sage-poet endowed with knowledge of the divine. This analysis leads to a discussion of the nature of knowledge and the two foundations of perfect kingship in Sanāʾī’s poetry, intellect and justice. It argues that the metaphysical framework of Sanāʾī’s works binds the political and the mystical aspects of his poems together. Through a description of the soul’s journey to God Sanāʾī explains that drawing near God, experiencing divine love, and becoming a valī (in its mystical sense) is a prerequisite for being a perfect ruler. This mystical theory of rulership recurs in later political texts and plays a significant role in shaping Perso-Islamic political ethics during the twelfth through sixteenth centuries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".