The Origins of Human Society and Justice in Early Modern Islamic Political Thought

This article offers a detailed examination of theories about the emergence of social life and the establishment of political authority and justice as developed in the central and eastern Islamic lands. Nasir al-Din Tusi (13th century), one of the major representatives of akhlaq literature, produced a powerful synthesis of earlier Islamic and ancient Greek theories to describe human society as growing out of man's need to obtain life necessities and likened the ruler to a physician Tusi's Nasirean Ethics exerted an important influence on Jalal al-Din Dawwani (15th century), a leading religious scholar, whose Jalalian Ethics contributed to the dissemination of Tusi's political and ethical thought. Akhlaq ideas on the origins of human society were one of the sources of the Ottoman political tradition, as evidenced by Tursun Beg's (15th century) History of Mehmed the Conqueror and KinalizadeAli Celebi's (16th century) Sublime EthicsEthics of Ali. Indo-Islamic political discourse on social origins is characterized by an abiding concern with the means of eliminating discord and achieving maintaining social balance. These sentiments are forcefully expressed in Abu'l-Fazl's (16th century) Institutes of Akbar, in which the ruler-as-the-shadow-of-od motif is employed to depict Akbar as the recipient of divine light transmitted through the sequence of biblical prophets and great rulers in human history.