Who is nizam al mulk

Serving for the Ghaznavids with his father, al-Mulk continued his job until the Seljuks captured Khorasan. After that point, the father and the son began working for the Seljuks, which previously declared its independence. Al-Mulk started his bureaucratic career as a high-ranking official under the vizier of Maliq Alparslan, however, the two could not get along with each other, and al-Mulk left for the Chagrhy Beg's court in Marw. Chaghry showed great interest and kinship to him and introduced him to Arslan, his son, and told him to accept al-Mulk as a father, too.

He backed Arslan in his fight against Suleiman, his brother, for the throne. As a gift of his support and thanking to Chagrhy Beg's advice to his son, al-Mulk was assigned as the Seljuk vizier by Arslan after he was crowned the sultan. Al-Mulk helped Arslan in both war and peace. Finally, he also gained great bureaucratic authority as Arslan seized the ultimate power.

After Arslan's sudden death, al-Mulk became the greatest man of Seljuk Empire. Arslan's son Malik Shah adored him, yet he was also afraid of his impact. Al-mulk governed the state affairs for about 35 years. Though the Abbasid Caliphate had higher educational institutions, its the Seljuk dynasty and personally vizier al-Mulk who systematized the madrasahs.

The Seljuk madrasah is called as the Nizamiya, a name pointing at the real founder. Sabbah's hatred against al-Mulk was coming from his impact on the rise of the Sunni scholarship and decline of the Ismailiyya sect in Khorasan and Iraq.

In Siyar al-muluk, his mirror for the Saljuq prince, on the other hand, governance is inflected with the language of religious and ethnic difference.

This chapter attempts to reconcile these seemingly contradictory assessments. Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter. Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us. All Rights Reserved. Nizam al-Mulk's name is especially associated with the founding of a series of colleges whose ethos and teachings were closely connected with the Ash'ari kalam and the Shafi'i legal school, of which the vizier himself was an adherent.

His reasons for the setting-up of a chain of madrasas in the main cities of 'Iraq, al-"azira and Persia and especially in his home province of Khurasan [see madrasa. But in the context of the age, with its reaction against Mu'tazilism in philosophy and dialectics and against political Shi'ism as manifested in the preceding Buyid and north Syrian amirates and the still-powerful Fatimid caliphate in Egypt and southern Syria, it seems possible that he aimed at training a body of reliable, Sunni-oriented secretaries and officials who would run the Great Saldjuq empire when Nizam al-Mulk had moulded it along the right lines and thus further the progress of the Sunni political and intellectual revival.

Bosworth, in Camb. For the first seven years of Malikshah's reign, Nizam al-Mulk's authority went altogether unchallenged. Malikshah now began to hope, indeed, for the overthrow of his mentor, showing extraordinary favour to officials such as Ibn Bahmanyar and, later, Sayyid al-Ru'asa' Ibn Kamal al-Mulk, who were bold enough to criticise him.

Ibn Bahmanyar went so far as to attempt the wazir's assassination also in , whereas Sayyid al-Ru'asa' contented himself with words. But in each case, Nizam al-Mulk was warned; and the culprits were blinded. In that year, however, occurred the first serious challenge to the Saldjuqid power, when Basra was sacked by a force of qarmatians [see qarmati]; and almost simultaneously their co-sectary the Assassin leader al-Hasan b. She was eager for Mahmud to be formally declared heir.

Nizam al-Mulk, however, was in favour of Barkiyaruq [q. Hence Terken Khatun became his bitter enemy, and joined with Tadj al-Mulk, who was in her service, in instigating Malikshah against the wazir.

Tadj al-Mulk accused Nizam al-Mulk to the sultan, who by this time was in any case incensed with the wazir's championship of al-Muqtadi, of extravagant expenditure on the army and of nepotism; and Malikshah's wrath was finally inflamed beyond bearing by an unguarded reply made by Nizam al-Mulkqto a formal accusation of these practices. But even so, he did not dare to dismiss him. The earliest historian to assert that he was dismissed is Rashid al-Din Fadl Allah, who appears to have misunderstood the purport of some verses by al-Nahhas quoted in the Rahat al-sudur of Rawandi, and really composed after the wazir's death.

His murderer, who was disguised as a Sufi, was immediately killed, but is generally thought to have been an emissary of al-Hasan b. Contemporaries, however, seem to have put the murder down to Malikshah, who died suddenly less than a month later, and to Tadj al-Mulk, whom Nizam al-Mulk's retainers duly tracked down and killed within a year.

Rashid al-Din combines the two theories, stating that the wazir's enemies at court concerted it with the Assassins. The truth is therefore uncertain; but as Rashid al-Din is one of the earliest historians to whom the Assassin records were available, his account would seem to deserve attention.

The extraordinary influence of Nizam al-Mulk is attested by the part played in affairs after his death by his relatives, despite the fact that only two appeared to have displayed much ability.

Bowen [C. In Baghdad, he also established the Nezamiyeh madrassa, named after him, for Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi whom he greatly respected. The biggest proof that he was a very farsighted scholar is that he discovered Imam Ghazali, one of the foremost Islamic scholars in history, and appointed him professor to this madrassa. Nizam al-Mulk would be busy with state affairs until noon. In the afternoon, he would listen to the public's petitions. He was very compassionate towards people.

While Nizam al-Mulk was working beside an emir, a high-ranking military or political official, in his youth, a dervish had come to him. Nizam al-Mulk did not understand what the man had meant. However, that same evening, the emir got drunk and went out to his garden, where he was torn to pieces by his own dogs, Nizam al-Mulk had understood the message that the dervish was trying to relay.

He started to look for a mentor for himself. The real teacher who guided Nizam al-Mulk was Abu ali Farmadi, one of the most famous sheikhs of Khorasan, not only in the external sciences but also in the spiritual sciences. When his teacher came to visit him, Nizam al-Mulk would make him sit in his own chair, not in the guest chair like other sheikhs, and he would kneel before him. Nizam al-Mulk led an almost altruistic life thanks to his teacher as he constantly helped the ulema and the sheikhs.

So much so that one day, the treasurer of Sultan Malik-Shah complained about him to the Sultan for giving , dinars to Islamic jurists and Sufis every year. Malik-Shah asked his vizier why he did so, and Nizam al-Mulk answered as follows. They can only kill people close to them, with the swords in their hands.

I, on the other hand, equip such an army with the money I spend that their prayers go up to the Heaven like arrows and nothing can prevent it from reaching Allah. Upon these words, Malik-Shah wept and demanded he increase the numbers of this army.

As a matter of fact, the Seljuk state collapsed, but this army supported by Nizam al-Mulk laid the foundations of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia. With their pure Ahl as-Sunnah beliefs that they did not contaminate with philosophy, Turks became the most powerful state in the world and buried the Byzantine Empire in history.