God-caliphate and God-king discourses in Imam Muhammad Ghazali’s Nasihat-ol-Molouk

The purpose of the present study is to look into the characteristics and value system of king-caliphate governance discourse in Imam Muhammad Ghazali’s Nasihat-ol-Molouk. The research method is descriptive and analytical, and the results revealed that the king is granted the charisma by which he undertakes to exercise justice and defend human rights as subjects are unspeakably subordinate to him. As for the discourse of caliphate governance, caliphate, the profile of God on earth, is the representative of enforcing laws and divine provisions and goodness to people, as people are required to act as absolute acolytes of caliphates and rulers. In the discourse proposed by Ghazali, the link between the two discourses is interactive rather than contradictory. That is to say, values and concepts are borrowed from Islam, as governance style and practices are indebted to the discourse of kingship. Theorists like Ghazali believe that power comes from the heavens and is granted to king or caliphate, binding people to merely follow caliphate as absolute rulers by fueling the idea that they are chosen individuals. Throughout the text of Nasihat-ol-Molouk, some kind of verbs prevail as a present perfect and indicative present for pre-Islamic kings, but verbs referring to caliphates are mostly subjunctive, and the text is mostly written with implications of an absent mode.