The Circle of Equity and Its Variations

At the very heart of the pre-modern relationship between temporal and religious power lay belief in a normative, divinely ordained social order with rulers at the apex as guarantors of the system in its entirety.

One of the most powerful and enduring expressions of this cosmic model is what is often called the circle of equity or justice (see also Bang, vol. 2, chap. 9).^[686] Variations upon this theme appear in Aristotle’s Politics, Vedic sources, and pre- Islamic Persian political theory, as well as in medieval European, classical Islamic, and Ottoman works. Commonly cited in “Mirrors for Princes,” the circle of equity both empowers the ruler and reminds him of his responsibilities toward the com­ponent parts of society, which change from version to version according to the norms of each author’s sociocultural environment. In its Ottoman form the circle of equity stated:

There can be no royal authority without the military.

There can be no military without wealth.

The subjects produce the wealth.

Justice preserves the subjects’ loyalty to the sovereign.

Justice requires harmony in the world.

The world is a garden, its walls are the state.

The Shari‘a orders the state.

There is no support for the Shari‘a except through royal authority.^[687]

In its ancient Mazdaean (Persian) and Vedic (Indian) forms, the “good” society over which the ruler presided was one characterized by an immutable social hierarchy of four estates: religious functionaries; the military; scribes (including scholars of various kinds); artisans, farmers, and traders.^[688] In these cases, the ruler’s cosmic or divinely mandated role was to maintain order and avert chaos by preserving the distinctions between these estates, or the variations of them that appeared over time.

Although both purport to come from the reign of the first Sasanian emperor, Ardashir I (r. 224-240), the scholarly consensus is that they probably date to the sixth century ce and were probably also modified in the process of translation from Persian to Arabic. The Letter of Tansar purports to be a missive from the chief priest (herbad) of Ardashir I, to a provincial prince, Gushnasp, answering var­ious criticisms the latter has posed to avoid offering allegiance to the new Sasanian shahanshah. In the course of the letter, Tansar states that the ruler is the linchpin and restorer of the social order, “The king of kings through his pure intelligence and surpassing excellence caused these four estates, which had fallen away, to be restored.”^[689] Prior to this, the Letter stresses the religious dimension to this process, stating that Sasanian state and religion “were born of one womb, joined together.”^[690] In fact, part of Ardashir's reconstructive task is to save the Mazdaean faith, also known as Zoroastrianism, from the chaos into which it has fallen. Similarly, the Testament of Ardashir states:

Know that kingship and religion are twin brothers, there is no strength to either without its companion, because religion is the foundation and support of kingship and kingship is henceforth the guardian of religion.^[691]

Both texts clarify this alliance by reference to the circle of equity, which expresses the point that the ruler can only maintain the justice beloved of the Mazdaean gods with an army, which he can only support by taxing the fruits of agriculture and crafts, while the productive subject population can only flourish if the ruler maintains justice. While such constructs may have had little real impact on social systems, they did play an important role as a legitimating discourse within Sasanian imperial ideology.^[692] The difficulties faced by rival Persian lineages in dislodging the Sasanian line in the years around the Arab conquest (late 620s-630s ce) is a measure of their success.^[693]

However, between the lines of these bold assertions of a strong emperor (shahanshah), who is the guarantor of Zoroastrianism and thus a just society, runs a contrary historical and ideological thread in the form of the criticisms of the pro­vincial prince, Gushnasp, the supposed heresies which abound, and the pitfalls which the heirs of Ardashir must strive to avoid.

The circle of equity was probably conveyed to Islamic audiences by means of translated Greek texts and via the many Persians who converted to the new faith and played an important political role from the ‘Abbasid caliphate onward. Assisted by Arabic translations of texts such as the Letter of Tansar and the Testament of Ardashir, Muslims of “the pen” cast the circle of equity or justice in a new Islamic guise which interposed God's revealed law, the Shari‘a, as the measure of justice, thereby rendering the ruler both the servant of the Shari‘a and its ultimate guar­antor.^[695] Although the static social structure upon which the Sasanian circle of eq­uity was predicated conflicted to an extent with the egalitarian and meritocratic impulses of early Islam, within a couple of centuries these impulses had been “tamed”^[696] and a new Islamic imperial synthesis emerged, along with a cosmology which placed Islam at the center of the divinely appointed social order.

The Islamized circle of equity and associated quadripartite divisions of society appear in many works with a moral or political dimension, including those of the Persian Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201-1279) and the North African Ibn Khaldun (1332­1406), but the model flowered particularly in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire alongside the works of Ibn Khaldun, discussed in the following section, as the Ottomans sought to bolster their power.^[697] This flags up the fact that such explanatory modes had particular value for rulers and/or ruling elites when their power was either weak or contested and, ironically, testify to the absence of the ideals which they propounded and the inability of imperial powers to impose their will upon resistant subjects.

Closely connected to the circle of equity and the social estates which it delineated was the notion of the body politic, which also had Aristotelian origins.^[698] This was another way of conceptualizing the pivotal role of a ruler and giving the institution of monarchy an organic and thus unquestioned position. Although not explicitly religious, like the circle of equity, conceptions of the body politic which made the ruler either its head or heart also assumed that this hierarchy was divinely ordained and situated religious personnel within it, thereby creating an ideal relationship not only between power and the sacred, but also between king and clergy.

From the medieval Latin perspective the “mystical body of the church was complemented by a political body” in which “the clergy functions as the body's soul, the prince its head with the various ‘organs' of his government making up the senses and the viscera, the knighthood and lesser royal officials the hands, and peasants and others of servile condition the feet.”^[699] While one might consider such constructs as Active and distanced from social reality, they nonetheless provided a template, a discursive tradition, which was widely accepted as valid, by literate sections of the population at least, and which gave a sacred and normative status to the realities of power.

As a result, models of society which conceptualized the ruler as the head or the heart of the body politic and as the pivotal point in the circle of equity tended to coincide with beliefs concerning the divine right of rulers and the importance of “signs” to indicate that an individual or lineage possessed that right. Such signs in­cluded military victories, prosperity, and general benefits, or more specific miracles of healing. The Achaemenid Persian ruler Cyrus boasted that his entry into Babylon indicated the preference of its ruling god, Marduk, for him.^[700] The mark of a Chinese ruler who possessed royal virtue (de) entrusted by heaven was his attention to rites, the gifts he distributed, and the prosperity and stability of his reign.^[701] The Chinese notion of de finds a loose analog in the Arabo-Islamic concept of baraka, the benef­icence that both sultans and saints could convey to others.^[702] Although Ferhat has argued that Muslim sultans were seen as corrupted by power and did not possess the divine right enjoyed by medieval Christian monarchs,^[703] the evidence points more to a field of contestation with sultans and saints vying to demonstrate their baraka to the population.

Religion could also function to explain the rise and fall of empires. The historical evidence for the cyclical nature of empire often conflicted with more linear reli­gious models predicated either on the imminent end of days or a steady decline from a revelatory high point, but from an instrumental rather than theological perspective the aspiration for religious renewal could have empire-building poten­tial. One well-known exponent of this kind of analysis is the fourteenth-century Muslim intellectual, courtier, and political player, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who analyzed the interplay between empire-building and religion in the introduc­tion (Muqaddima) to his universal history, the Kitab al-‘Ibar (Book of Examples), translated by Franz Rosenthal.^[704] What has intrigued Western commentators par­ticularly is Ibn Khaldun's apparently “modern” instrumental view of religion as the force that enables tribes to overcome the internal feuds and divisions of the tribal environment and channel their natural kin-based esprit de corps or group soli­darity (asabiyya) into capturing sedentary areas and urban settlements to create new empires on the ruins of the old.^[705] As Ernest Gellner, who greatly admired Ibn Khaldun, notes, his theory does not work for all societies, but it is a brilliant expose of the society he knew best, the medieval tribal Maghrib and beyond that the Islamic world in general.^[706]

Interestingly, Ibn Khaldun does not see religion as essential to state formation per se, but he does see it as crucial to the creation of empires. His fourth proposition on dynasties, royal authority, the caliphate, and other forms of government is that “dynasties of wide power and large royal authority have their origin in religion based either on prophethood or truthful propaganda.”^[707] He elaborates by saying that political authority depends on superior numbers and this can only be secured by the extensive group solidarity generated by common commitment to truth and a rejection of the world. This observation forms a bridge between Ibn Khaldun's prag­matic analysis of the role of religion as a unifying force and one that distinguishes a group from its rivals, and the argument he also makes for the moral superiority of states founded on religious precepts, a common Islamic proposition, albeit more honored in the breach than the practice.