Modern perceptions of cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Islamic empires have centered around the differences between the European and Islamic systems of political organization in an effort to valorize Western political values and styles of rulership. The present article challenges some of the assumptions that inform scholarship on contacts between Europe and the Islamic world in the early modern period by pointing to hitherto unexplored affinities between the Florentine and Islamic traditions of political thought. In particular, it investigates the use of ancient Greek theories of the four humors/elements of the human body in an extensive corpus of writings produced by seminal political theorists, historians, and figures of intellectual and political life in early modern Florentine (Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, Donato Giannotti), Persian (Ṭūsī, Dawwānī, Kāshifī), Mughal (Khwāndamīr, Abūʾl-Fazl), and Ottoman (Kınalızâde, Kâtib Çelebi) traditions from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. My analysis demonstrates that Galen’s humoral theory served the aforementioned writers as a conceptual tool for identifying the mutual dependency of the component parts of the body politic as one of the key determinants of domestic balance and harmony and for theorizing remedies against strife and friction.

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This article offers an in-depth discussion of the theory of civilization of Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi, a prominent Muslim scholar in eighteenth-century India. It shows that Shāh Walī Allāh articulates a naturalistic understanding of the genesis of social life and the evolution of civilization, outlines the factors involved in the decline of the state and the empire, and sets forth a program for dealing with a broad range of emergencies. It explores the ways in which Shāh Walī Allāh’s thought relates to previous Islamic political discourse, notably the akhlā q (Ṭūsī, Dawwānī) and Indo-Islamic (Baranī, Abū’l-Faẓl) traditions of political thought. It also investigates Shāh Walī Allāh’s use of the Byzantine paradigm as a heuristic device to trace the causes of the dissolution of the Mughal Empire. The article looks at Shāh Walī Allāh’s analysis of Byzantine decline from a cross-cultural perspective and places him in conversation with Byzantine political writers who discuss the factors that led to the decay of the Byzantine Empire.

This article offers a comparative investigation of Marsilius of Padua’s and Isaac Abravanel’s ideas on kingship. It looks at how these thinkers transform the “canonical” sources of their respective traditions of political theorizing, i.e., Aristotle’s Politics and the Bible, to articulate the notion that ultimate authority rests with the citizens/people. It also examines how these two writers’ positions on kingship relate to the political realities that prevailed in late medieval Italy. Finally, it illuminates the medieval precedents of modern republicanism in the Christian and Jewish political traditions.

This essay proposes a novel interpretation of the Fatāwā-i Jahāndārī (Precepts of world rulership), one of the major sources of Indo-Islamic political thought produced by Ziyā' al-Dīn Baranī, a seminal Indo-Islamic political theorist and historian (fourteenth century). It shows that one of the main thrusts of Baranī's theory is to offer a comprehensive account of the various kinds and manifestations of emergencies and modes of treating the diseases afflicting the body politic. It also investigates the ways in which Baranī's ideas on emergencies relate to the political circumstances that prevailed during the Delhi Sultanate period as well as to previous works of political and moral advice, particularly Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī's Nasirean Ethics . In addition, this essay is the first systematic endeavor to place Barani in conversation with Western political writers, especially Niccolò Machiavelli. It explores the affinities between these two authors' views on emergencies and, more broadly, on the challenges associated with rulership and the qualities requisite for an efficient ruler. My analysis of Baranī's ideas within the context of the Islamic tradition and the cross-cultural comparison with Machiavelli highlights the normative dimensions of his theory and its relevance to current debates on emergencies.