Siyasat-nama and Discursive Turn in Iranian Political Thought; the Speech Act Analysis of Siyar al-mulûk

The relation between author and social context in discourse turn of Iranian and Islamic political thought is a matter of great concern. The social contexts of 7th to 9th centuries created new condition which in turn paved the ground for change and development of Iranian and Islamic political philosophy and its discursive turn. In response to this change and political contexts of Iranian-Islamic society, emerged three schools of thought among the thinkers of this period. Al-Mawardi and introducing of caliphate system, Al-Ghazali with Islamic justification of authority of the Kings in order to reconcile between caliphate and kingship and, finally, Nizam al-Mulk by Siyasatnama (The Book of Government) who tried to pass the caliphate system and articulate a new discourse. Relying on the Iranian tradition of Ideal King, Nizam al-Mulk tries to justify kingship with an expedient approach. Such a conflict is distinguishable in Siyasatnama. Within this book, there is a conflict between three discourses: caliphate, kingship and religious discourse of resistance. This paper is going to verify the hypothesis that Nizam al-Mulk has played the role of “poiltical subjective” in the discursive transformation from writing Shariatnama (Islamic laws) to Andarzname (Book of advice). He uses three lingual strategies in order to play subjective situation role: to omit caliphate discourse by “concealing” it, and highlight the kingship discourse by excluding other discourses of resistance that are traceable in the book. The methodology of the article is a combination of Laclau and Mouffe discourse theory and micro-level approach of Van leeuwen discourse Analysis.