Neguin Yavari

The eleventh century brought a new political order to the eastern Islamic lands. It would be a mistake to assume that the political and scholarly elites of the era were merely sleepwalking into a new world. The intellectual record preserves a fierce debate among competing conceptions of legitimate rule and good governance, often linked to varying theologies of what was conceived as true “Islam.” My research is concerned with the performative dimension of these theoretical debates. The purpose is not to define political concepts or religious dogma, but rather, to point to the ways in which they functioned, and in this manner, arrive at a more refined understanding of the social and political problems that they reflected and indexed.