Dīdār-e khod dar āyeneh-ye chashm-e dīgarī Persian 2025

The book consists of six essays by the author, unified by a common theme and focused on examining Iranian political thought in the premodern period, particularly the Middle Ages. These essays had not previously been translated into Persian.

In them, the author traces the evolution of concepts of rulership and explores notions such as justice and injustice, the regulation of violence, coercive power, and related ideas within the history of Iran and the broader Islamic world. Three major paradigms—the caliphate, kingship, and the imamate—are analyzed both as historical realities and as they appear in the writings of historians and jurists, with particular attention to the relationship between religious wisdom and political power based on coercion.

From the author’s perspective, the emergence of the institution of monarchy in the Islamic world resulted from the gradual weakening and eventual collapse of the authority of the caliphate, alongside the fragmentation of the Islamic empire that had once existed under the banner of the caliphate.