ABSTRACT
The political turmoil caused by the ending of the Muslim caliph’s political power generated a number of strong statements of the Circle of Justice. In the tenth century, a series of warlords, rivals, and invaders, the most powerful of whom were the Buyids of Iraq and Iran and the Fatimids of Egypt and Syria, broke the Abbasid Empire into pieces. Most of the rulers of the empire’s fragments continued to acknowledge the Abbasid caliphs as dispensers of legitimacy and heads of the Muslim community in a religious sense, though they no longer governed it politically. These rulers developed separate administrative structures in different regions of the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and North Africa where they employed local languages and political arrangements. The fragmentation and multiplication of governments, rather than turning society away from the Circle of Justice as a political ideology, instead provided enlarged opportunities for advisors and writers to develop the themes of justice and good administration and for people to demand it from the authorities, who now might be less distant and less concerned with other modes of legitimation. In this setting two of the most powerful carriers of the Circle of Justice were created, Firdausi’s epic on the kings of Persia, the Book of Kings (Shahnama), and the anonymous Secret of Secrets (Sirr al-Asrar), containing the oldest extant representation of this idea actually written in a circle.
