The Phenomenology of the Objective and Subjective Requirements of The Ideal king, in the Iranian Conception; before and after Islam (Case Study of Nasīhah al-Muluk Saadi and the Great Word in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi)

Didactic writing is a valuable legacy that reflects Iranians’ wisdom. The contents of didactic texts, as the name implies, are moral, religious, political, and social advice of the elites and reformers addressed to the king. Therefore, didactic texts are an illustration of the ideal king of the Iranian elite. Didactic texts, as the crystallization of one of the most important forms of knowledge, originate from two sources, i.e. Iranian and Islamic sources. In this paper, the works of two prominent Iranian intellectuals, that is Saadi’s Nasihat al-Muluk and Ferdowsi’s “Bozorgmehr” in Shahname, who have tried to revive the tenets of Iranian ruling, one using Islamic teachings and the other by referring to the ancient Iranian sources, are studied. In fact, this article seeks to find out how the Iranian and Islamic sources influenced the features of the ideal king in both practical and mental aspects. Seeking help from phenomenology and Pareto’s elitism, one can find similarities—which reflect this influence between the texts of Saadi and Ferdowsi. These similarities reveal the historical continuity of Iranians’ conception of the characteristics of the ideal king. Thus, this paper focuses on the common points of these two historical texts written in different historical, political and religious contexts about the characteristics of the ideal king.