NiẒĀm Al-Mulk
NIẒĀM AL-MULK (AH 408–485/1018–1092 CE) was a celebrated Persian vizier. Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Isḥāq al-Ṭūsī was born in Nawqān, a village near Ṭus in Khurāsān. He served two Saljūq sultans, Ālp Arsalān (r. 1063–1073) and his son Malikshāh ibn Ālp Arsalān (r. 1073–1092), and held the honorifics Niẓām al-Mulk (administrator of the realm), Qawām al-Dīn (upholder of religion), and Ghiyâth al-Dawla (mainstay of government). Niẓām al-Mulk was a Shāfiʿī in law and an Ashʿarī in theology. He befriended Ṣūfīs and built numerous educational institutions, known as madrasahs. He was assassinated in 1092 in a small village outside of Iṣfahān. In his seventy-four years, Niẓām al-Mulk rose from being a member of the bureaucracy of the provincial governor of Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan) to the de facto ruler of a vast empire, with a final apotheosis as the archetypal good vizier in the world of Islam.
Modern appraisals of Niẓām al-Mulk, often based on an uncritical distillation of medieval sources, tend to cast him in the mold of later reformist but absolutist rulers, who promoted religious orthodoxy, particularly through the founding of religious institutions, to counter latent forces of anarchy inherent in a world of steadily disintegrating spiritual authority and ever increasing tribal incursions and political conflicts.
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