DEAR SON, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? 95
Firdawsi's Shahnama had a profound influence. It is from Shahna-
ma's Alexander narrative cycle that Nizami Ganjawi (d. ca. 1209) gives
birth to the Iskandarnama genre in one of his quintet of Khamsa.^32 It
is Nizami's desire for immortality (such as that granted to Firdawsi)
that makes him seek out Khizr, who kisses Nizami in a dream and
gives him the idea to write about Alexand~r. In Nizami's Iskandar-
nama, there exists the new capacity of Alexander to grow as an indi-
vidual and t,o have a multifaceted character: a king, a conqueror, a
mystic, a prophet. In Nizami, the idea (first extrapolated by Firdawsi)
that there can be a pre-Islamic precedent to an Islamic ethos gains full
currency. In Nizami, Alexander is fully articulated as a prophet on a
righteous path, and his forays into governance or administration can
then be seen as divinely sanctioned-no matter that this divinity pre-
dates the Prophet Muhammad. This view of Alexander is reproduced in
Amir Khusraw Dehlavi's A'ina-ye Iskandari and later proliferations.
Chachnama's letters clearly offer political guidance akin to texts
in the "Mirror for Princes" genre. Led by Julie Meisami, Stefan Leder,
Dwight Reynolds, Brigette Grundler, ,and Dimitri Gutras, the schol-
arship on adab (right conduct, or advice) literature has focused on ex-
plicating the forms of genres and tracing the routes of transmission
across Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, and Persian texts.^33 The traced routes
of development from the 'A.bbasid courts of the ninth through tenth
centuries and the emergence of Aristotelian thought and ethics in
India after Nasir ud Din Tusi are also well studied. The key advice
texts in this intellectual tradition are the Siyasatnama (Book of Poli-
tics) by Nizam Mulk (ror8-ro92), the Qabusnama (Book of Qabus) by
Qabus ibn Vushmgir [d. ro12), and the Rasa'il Ikhwan Safa' [ca. tenth
century).
What has received less scholarly attention is the configuration of
the particular texts in this genre itself-that is, the making of this
"canon" of political thought and the ways in which texts participated
in it or were moved in and out of it. For instance, Chachnama as an
example of fe,.thnama or maghazi [conquest literature) has never been
seen as relevant to the study of advice literature in India. This has pro-
found consequences for the ways in which we trace the development
of the "Mirror for Princes" or neo-Aristotelian thought in Muslim