ABSTRACT
H. asan the son of Alı¯, known as Niz. a¯m al-Mulk, was a celebrated Persian vizier and administrator, born on a Friday in 1018 in Tus, near the city of Mashhad in the province of Khurasan. He was stabbed to death in a village outside Isfahan on another Friday in 1092, a couple of months after he had been removed from the vizierate by the Turkic ruler, Maliksha¯h (r. 1073-92), of the Saljuq dynasty (r. 10401194). In the course of those 74 years, he rose from the relatively humble status of a bureaucrat in the service of the provincial governor of Balkh in Afghanistan to become the de facto ruler of a vast empire stretching east to Central Asia and Afghanistan and west to Syria and Anatolia, with a final apotheosis as the archetypal good vizier in Islamic history. As his honorifics – Niz. a¯m al-Mulk (“Pivot of the State”), Ghiya¯th al-Dawla (“Mainstay of Government”), Qiwa¯m al-Dı¯n (“Pillar of Religion”), and Rad. ı¯ Amı¯r al-Mu minı¯n (“Favored One of the Commander of the Faithful”) – indicate, he was extolled in his own time and by posterity as the most able politician of the era, and upheld as an exemplar of justice, political astuteness and overall good governance in the medieval Islamic sources. His was a long-lived administration, a remarkable achievement in itself in the Islamic empire in the eleventh century. Moreover, he was the progenitor of a dynasty of viziers and high officials, with several of his sons and grandsons serving as councilors to the Saljuqs.
