Rhetoric, Morality, and the Ethos of Praise

The Islamicate reception of The Art of Rhetoric sharpened the didactic bent of Aristotle’s theory of praise and blame, binding epideictic oratory ever more closely to the maintenance of civic and moral order. The three components of the rhetorical moment, “the speaker, the subject that he treats, and the person to whom it is addressed,” were all explicitly incorporated into a moral framework imbricated with civil order.Footnote ²² To elucidate this reception history, I trace the Peripatetic commentary tradition around The Art of Rhetoric developed by al-Fārābī (c. 870–c. 950), Ibn Sīnā (c. 980–1037), and Ibn Rushd (1126–98). Across these thinkers, what comes to the fore is an investment in epideictic rhetoric not simply as the art of persuasion, but more so as a moral techne that participates in the emergence and consolidation of an ethical sociality. The overarching reception history of Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, mapped across the above-mentioned thinkers but also transcending them, illumines the intellectual culture around rhetoric contemporaneous with the high noon of the Ghaznavid panegyric, and thereby offers a means to understand how individual panegyrists might have appropriated and troubled the ethical norms expected of their poetic praxis—with an eye to its larger, political stakes.

In his “Book of Rhetoric,” al-Fārābī contends that any rhetorical effort has its ground in the “moral excellence” of an orator, to the extent that, even in the absence of other rhetorical devices like enthymemes and example, the orator can “achieve excellent persuasion.”Footnote ²³ The implication in this claim is that rhetoric can succeed without a syllogistic or inductive demonstration if, and only if, the orator is recognized to possess a high ethical stature. Where moral excellence is lacking or “not well established,” by contrast, al-Fārābī mandates that an orator “will need arguments to show his superior moral character and the lack of moral excellence in his opponent.”Footnote ²⁴ One’s moral character is directly correlated with one’s rhetorical effectivity. Inasmuch as the ideal orator is morally excellent, his audience, in al-Fārābī’s view, should respond to him on the basis of moral propositions:

What is crucial for al-Fārābī is that rhetoric can affectively incite moral change, whereby it can encourage audiences to “follow certain moral values” according to an orator’s moral propositions, irrespective of whether they possess those same values. Therefore, through a structure of identification that begets the emulation of virtuous and knowledgeable people, rhetoric can augment the moral excellence of an audience, and by extension a sociality. It is for this reason that al-Fārābī, when writing on the virtuous city, reserves a place for “the rhetoricians” and “the poets,” for they are “the transmitters of the creed” of the virtuous.Footnote ²⁶ Those rhetoricians and poets who do not share this kind of civic imperative are, presumably, already exiled from the virtuous city.

Ibn Sīnā, following from al-Fārābī’s emphasis on the civic effectivity of rhetoric, stresses the relation between the popular appeal of rhetoric and moral education. In his “Compendium,” Ibn Sīnā writes that “Rhetoric has many benefits in civic matters more than any other arts. Ordinary minds are more disposed to it, they are more perceptive of its exigency, and they all practice some of it.”Footnote ²⁷ Rhetoric, in addition to being the art of persuasion, is a mode of communication that transcends the boundaries of any one group, and is therefore capable of inducing responses from “ordinary minds”; more simply, rhetoric establishes common ground between different social groups. To have common ground with ordinary minds, in the case of didactic epideixis, is to expand the legibility of virtue beyond the already virtuous and consequently provoke the not-yet virtuous to moral refinement. The epideictic orator, of course, represents his object according to the language of praise and blame, which establishes a binary frame of reference for the common ground of epideixis. Moral education transpires within this binary. “Praise,” Ibn Sīnā writes, “is directed at the beautiful for its own sake,” before he enumerates several “constituents of virtue” that, being beautiful, deserve praise.Footnote ²⁸ Although praiseworthy in and for itself, “the beautiful” must in fact be represented by an orator, or poet, to enter the sphere of social circulation and significance. The epideictic orator, by reproducing the beautiful at the level of the signifier, crucially activates an aspirational impulse in his audience, prompting the recognition of the beautiful alongside the desire to participate in the beautiful. Praise, then, emerges as a means by which the beautiful becomes conceptually discernible, ethically compelling, and morally transformative. Ibn Sīnā associates praise, after all, with God, to whom the title “the guardian of praise” is given at the end of the “Compendium.”Footnote ²⁹ When one engages in praise, one discloses aspects of the divine.

In his engagement with Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, Ibn Rushd further amplifies the civic indispensability of praise by considering it as an instrument of moral governance within a sociality. Echoing Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd asserts that rhetoric, writ large, is key in communicating with and ordering “the multitude” because, “to the extent that man is a social being and a citizen, he necessarily uses rhetorical arguments” in the deliberative, forensic, and epideictic registers.Footnote ³⁰ The benefits of rhetoric lie in its capacity to achieve cohesion with respect to virtue, as it can

As a sociality is comprised of non-ideal subjects, Ibn Rushd conceives of rhetoric as a “control” that ought to be exercised by the leader to inhibit his subjects’ tendency toward “unjust actions.” A leader who fails in the art of rhetoric fails as a leader, as the responsibility for any unjust action in this conception is shared between him and the subject guilty of said unjust action; conversely, an ideal leader, deploying rhetorical control, would inculcate virtue both in its positive (“urge citizens to do virtuous deeds”) and negative (prevent “the opposite of what is virtuous and just”) aspect.Footnote ³² The epideictic oration, in its focus on praise and blame vis-à-vis moral character in the time of the present, is especially conducive to these civic ends, in that it triggers the cognitive-affective responses of emulation and avoidance, of “doing or abandoning a certain thing.”Footnote ³³ Ibn Rushd accordingly focalizes the social component of virtue: “A man is worthy of praise for every act of virtue that is not done for his own sake.”Footnote ³⁴ That which merits praise is a selfless kind of virtue that takes the other as its object, with the assumption that virtue is embedded within a network of social relations. Ibn Rushd indeed clarifies that virtue “involv[es] one person and other persons” as opposed to “a relation between a person and himself.”Footnote ³⁵ Epideixis, in representing a necessarily socialized kind of virtue in the language of praise—as a model of emulation—is fundamentally geared toward rhetorically constructing a civic consciousness and sense of civic duty that can realize an ideal of ethical citizenship.Footnote ³⁶ Being a jurist, Ibn Rushd also would be cognizant of how this understanding of epideixis is imbricated with the shariʿa, above all the incentive for “commanding right and forbidding wrong.”Footnote ³⁷

When one considers the developments in Islamicate Peripatetic rhetorical theory around the time of ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī, which decidedly center the cultivation of an ethical sociality through moral exempla (that encourage emulation or avoidance), one might be tempted to read the praise that typifies the Persian panegyric in primarily moral-didactic terms. After all, the Peripatetics ascribe a civic imperative to the orator (and poet), who, using his ability to influence the “soul”—with all the connotations of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic psychology—can reliably achieve certain degrees of moral transformation in his auditors.Footnote ³⁸ Meisami’s insistence on interpreting praise through a homiletic paradigm, when confronted by discontinuities between the generic norm of political legitimation and cases that trouble that norm, is subsequently quite understandable: she seems to conflate her view of the panegyric with contemporaneous rhetorical theory. The problem with such an approach is that it remains blind to the possibility of a gap between the heteronomy of poetic praxis, from poet to auditor, and the civic imperative of epideixis, driven by a notion of psychological automatism, theorized in Peripatetic philosophy. ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī’s panegyrics, for example, encode dissent toward Maḥmūd in the language of praise that was sanctified by rhetorical theory as a didactic vehicle. By situating these panegyrics within and against the intellectual backdrop of Peripatetic rhetorical theory, it becomes readily apparent that their ironizing of praise goes beyond a play with poetic convention and extends into civic and political critique.

A Theory of Panegyric Praise

Ibn Rushd’s “Short Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics,” opens with an “endorsement of the Rhetoric,” insofar as it treats poetry as (epideictic) oratory: “Poetical speeches are rhythmically balanced speeches.”Footnote ³⁹ As he anchors Aristotle’s poetic sensibilities in his rhetorical theory, which foregrounds moral didacticism, Ibn Rushd considers poetry to be didactic as well: “Because those who make representations and comparisons seek thereby to encourage the performance of some voluntary actions and discourage others, the things they seek to represent are necessarily either virtues or vices.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In this view, poetry’s representational function is inseparable from its ethical charge. Although Ibn Rushd presents us with an intervention that postdates the Ghaznavid panegyrists under study, his work is an illustrative continuation of Islamicate Peripatetic philosophical poetics, which, believing Aristotle’s Poetics and The Art of Rhetoric to be included in the Organon, treated poetry and rhetoric as complementary branches of logic.Footnote ⁴¹ Justine Landau has specifically affirmed the penetration of Islamicate Peripatetic thought into Persian literary criticism, using the examples of thinkers such as Niẓāmī ʿArūżī (1110–61) and Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (1201–74), who produced theories of poetry that heavily depended on thinkers like al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā.Footnote ⁴²

In the Four Discourses, Niẓāmī ʿArūżī frames the poetic act in terms similar to those used to explicate epideictic oratory in the Islamicate commentaries on Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric: the poet is tasked with “arrang[ing] imaginary propositions and blend[ing] fruitful analogies,” such that he “act[s] on the imagination” and consequently “excites the faculties of anger and concupiscence … whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of great things in the order of the world.”Footnote ⁴³ Operating like a logician and rhetorician, the poet is responsible for the construction and dissemination of a set of “imaginary propositions” that, in their particular organization and delivery, are to eventually provoke auditors to “the accomplishment of great things.” There is additionally a psychological automatism suggested in this formulation: the work of the poet aims toward “the faculties of anger and concupiscence.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Epideixis, to put it another way, alters the humoral disposition of its auditor, so as to provoke intentional psychological effects. Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī likewise notes that poetry “stirs passions” even if its propositions are “fit or not to induce [rational] assent” as in traditional logic; however, this impinging on the passions is nevertheless formulated in terms of an alignment with (emulation) or separation from (avoidance) the content of a poetic syllogism.Footnote ⁴⁵ The poetic act aims to establish agreement between poem and auditor with regard to poetic content. In the context of panegyric poetry, the content of which is generically the praise of virtue (with all the civic expectations from rhetorical theory), this notion of agreement inevitably becomes intertwined with an ethical end. Given later theorizations of the panegyric, I suggest that the criterion of moral agreement constitutes a superstructure that must be supported by an infrastructure of aesthetic agreement. The panegyric, that is, had to circumscribe its investment in praise according to various internal (semantic and semiotic) and external (generic) criteria of aesthetic agreement. I propose to excavate four structures of praise, outlined at the outset of this essay, by examining the ideal of agreement as it is formulated by Ibn Rushd and Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Qais al-Rāzī (act. 1204–30). At the same time, I intend to consider how these structures might be challenged by the demands of their courtly environment, with a nod to the Qābūs Nāma of Kai Kāʿūs ibn Iskandar (1021–87). By theorizing these structures of praise, I illumine how a panegyrist might exploit manipulations of aesthetic agreement to introduce forms of ironic dissent within a seemingly orthodox panegyric.

In his study of the panegyric, Ibn Rushd argues that the praise of virtue, to the end of moral refinement, is assured through its demonstration in both poetic content and form. He notes, following Aristotle’s paradigm for tragedy, that panegyric consists of “mythic statements, characters, meter, beliefs, spectacle, and melody.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The mythic statements, which are in effect aspects of plot, serve to disclose “the object” of a panegyric—the object of panegyric praise—which is some virtuous ideal rooted in the elements of belief and character, the former involving the existence of a virtue and the latter its ideal articulation.Footnote ⁴⁷ The ethical content of a panegyric is to be mirrored in the remaining elements of meter, melody, and spectacle. I would like to focus on Ibn Rushd’s explanation of spectacle, in particular: “spectacle” is defined as “a representative statement” that “argu[es] for the correctness of a belief or the correctness of a deed.”Footnote ⁴⁸ What emerges in this prescription is a desire for agreement between a claim of praise and its demonstration: spectacle evinces the correctness of the ethical ideal that is praised in a panegyric. I term this mode of agreement evidentiary: any laudatory claim advanced in a panegyric, insofar as it promises or necessitates corroboration, can only be considered laudatory if it agrees with the corroboration it implies.

Shams-i Qais’ manual on courtly poetics extends Ibn Rushd’s emphasis on aesthetic agreement across the totality of poetic production, but importantly moves away from Ibn Rushd’s civic concerns. When discussing the organization of a poem, he instructs the poet to “consider as necessary all aspects of the agreement of baits (distichs) and misrāʿs (hemistichs), and the correspondence of words and themes,” lest “the lustre of the poetry is dimmed.”Footnote ⁴⁹ For Shams-i Qais, a poet ensures “all aspects of … agreement” in a poem, agreement being necessary to poetic creation. Two modalities of agreement are centered in this prescription: on the one hand, there should be intradistich agreement, whereby every hemistich agrees, semantically and semiotically, with its associated hemistich in a distich; on the other, there should be interdistich agreement, whereby every distich semantically agrees with other distichs. The words and themes of a poem, more simply, should share semantic valence and showcase semiotic consistency. As a whole, then, a poem is ideally an orderly register of that which it thematizes, such as a moral didacticism.Footnote ⁵⁰ A successful laudatory claim in a panegyric agrees, per these criteria, with itself at the scale of a single distich (intradistich agreement), but also with all other distichs (interdistich agreement). Shams-i Qais’ ideal of agreement is not restricted to the internal structure of a poem, however, and encompasses external impositions like genre. As he opines, a poem “must not deviate with regard to the species of discourse and the varieties of poetry.”Footnote ⁵¹ When situating oneself within an established species of discourse or variety of poetry, the poet must not deviate from its recognizable norms. A generic norm is thereby transformed into a generic law, such that any genre is reduced to a predefined manner, purpose, and idiom—in other words, generic agreement. A panegyric, for example, can only be a panegyric if it adopts the language of praise. To the extent that this fidelity to generic norms codifies generic unity, or the illusion thereof, it also conceals generic subversion that reproduces generic norms only to ironize them.

The ideal of agreement expressed by Ibn Rushd instantiates the immanent concordance, or self-sameness, of a virtue; for Shams-i Qais, by contrast, that which is instantiated is the unity of poetry as such, from production to reception. These thinkers’ diverging understandings of agreement reflect tellingly in their stances on the agreement of representation and referent. Ibn Rushd, for one, impresses the need for an ideal kind of agreement: the referent of panegyric praise is to be actual, not fictitious. Any “representation that comes about by means of false inventions … is not part of the poet’s activity,” he writes; as a panegyric seeks to inspire virtuous emulation, “existing matters” achieve “persuasion … more readily”—whereas that which is contrived “is not agreeable to all natures.”Footnote ⁵² The didactic end of a panegyric has as its condition of possibility the real agreement of representation and referent: a virtuous referent enables the praise of virtue. Ibn Rushd’s idealizing position on panegyric praise, due to his investment in its structuring of civic consciousness, forecloses the prospect of praising less-than-ideal addressees.

Shams-i Qais, because he is more occupied with the poeticity of a poem than with its civic function, resolves the dilemma of praising an addressee unworthy of praise by displacing the locus of referential agreement from addressee to social position. The insistence on generic conformity is coupled, to that effect, with an insistence on the conformity of a panegyric with its speech-situation. Shams-i Qais advises the poet to “address each according to his place and station,” rather than as each really is.Footnote ⁵³ For a panegyric, Shams-i Qais’ formulation justifies the address of praise to those of high place and station because of their place and station and, perhaps, in spite of their character. What this justification permits is the praise of a less-than-ideal addressee; that is, the practice of panegyric writing can prevail even in view of an unsuitable referent, in that it must prioritize harmony with its speech-situation. Shams-i Qais, in short, prioritizes poetic creation itself over questions of referential accuracy. Poetry must exhibit agreement both within itself and with its speech situation. This centering of poetic creation opens space for an insincerity in panegyric praise and, moreover, the ironizing of praise directed at an undeserving addressee. The hyperawareness of poetic creation, which would extend to professional poets, including panegyrists, as well as literary critics like Shams-i Qais, adds another dimension to praise, which I identify as metapoetic balance: bearing in mind that a panegyric recognizes, and comments, on its artifice while praising its addressee, any laudatory claim can only remain laudatory if it is not undercut or outdone by auto-laudatory, or metapoetic, claims.

A more realist view of courtly speech, including the panegyric, that is less attuned to aesthetic agreement than addressee reception can be found in Kai Kāʿūs’ Qābūs Nāma, which offers further insight into the possible insincerity of panegyric praise. Kai Kāʿūs affirms that “poetry is composed for the benefit of the general public and not for oneself alone.”Footnote ⁵⁴ As his poetry exceeds the self and finds its effectual life within the general public, the courtly poet cannot ignore how that public will receive a poem. Consequently, the courtly poet must remain acutely sensitive to the protocols of respectability that govern courtly speech: “[Words] to be understood but not uttered are such that concern a blunder … committed by a public personage” and “will expose [one] to the anger of that personage.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Kai Kāʿūs acknowledges that public personages can commit blunders and, to extrapolate, fall short of the ideals of virtuosity that may attend their place and station, to use Shams-i Qais’ language. Yet, even if these personages are defective in their moral character, their defects are not to be uttered, if only to guard the poet from their anger. Instead of faithfully representing these personages, Kai Kāʿūs counsels that “it is the poet’s duty to judge the character of his patron and know what will please him, for until you say what he desires, he will not give you what you need.”Footnote ⁵⁶ There is a privileging of that which will please the addressee over agreement of poetic representation and the addressee’s character—and, in fact, that character has to be sufficiently understood to the point that the poet is adept at flattery. This prudential sensitivity to reception serves the poet in acquiring what he needs from courtly addressees. The Qābūs Nāma, as far as it discusses poetry and speech within the courtly context, focalizes audience response over any axis of agreement in a poem written for the court. Whereas Ibn Rushd idealizes moral-aesthetic agreement in the panegyric praise of virtue and Shams-i Qais idealizes the act of writing poetry itself, Kai Kāʿūs offers a supplement of pragmatism: a panegyric must praise virtue, actual or not, to satisfy the expectations of a courtly audience. Niẓāmī ʿArūżī, to that point, provides two anecdotes evincing the successes of ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī in navigating their courtly environments by confirming the righteousness of their addressees: “To please the heart of one’s master and the humour of one’s patron” is the code of the courtly panegyrist.Footnote ⁵⁷

As Kai Kāʿūs repeatedly reminds his reader, genres such as the panegyric are located in the coarse facticity of courtly life and etiquette, where aesthetic ideals must confront the non-ideal, and at times dangerous, conditions of their reception. This intrusion of non-ideality into the seamlessness of poetic creation brings with it the possibilities of insincerity, irony, and dissent. Yet, at the same time, the demand for generic agreement imposes strict expectations on the panegyrist: a courtly audience would demand that a panegyric conform recognizably to the norms of praise, norms that poets, for the sake of their livelihoods, could not freely flout. Praise therefore becomes, due to the need for generic agreement, the singular idiom of a panegyric and, paradoxically, the very site where its end of legitimation can be ironized, contested, and inverted into delegitimation. Drawing from the theories of Ibn Rushd and Shams-i Qais, I delineate four structures of praise—evidentiary agreement, intradistich agreement, interdistich agreement, and metapoetic balance—to establish a provisional set of normative criteria by which the coherence of a panegyric may be assessed. Because panegyric poetry labors to fabricate the appearance of concord, a straining of its structures of praise assumes interpretive significance. I showcase, in the readings that follow, how ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī’s ironizing of structures of praise constitute gestures of dissent. A laudatory claim, more precisely, can be ironized and rendered accusatory through its failure to satisfy the criteria of any of the four structures of praise, even if it remains denotatively couched in the language of praise. Praise, in this way, can become a posture.

The Poetics of Delegitimation: Structures of Irony in the Ghaznavid Panegyric

To work within the frame of irony in the panegyric context, one must recognize, as Shams-i Qais would have it, that panegyrics must respect their generic norms. Only if a panegyric passes generic agreement can its claims of praise—because it would indeed have claims of praise—be tested against the four structures of praise outlined in the prior section. It remains to be examined how these structures both materialize and fracture within the respective panegyrics of ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī. ʿUnṣurī’s panegyric, written in commemoration of Maḥmūd’s accession to power, appears fairly standard: it is comprised of an exordium that centers Naurūz’s breeze as a source of beauty in a garden, an encomium riddled with praises of Maḥmūd, and a closing supplication for Maḥmūd’s long reign. Farrukhī’s panegyric, an occasional poem on Maḥmūd’s destruction of a Hindu temple in Somanāt, is much lengthier, and, following its opening foiling of Maḥmūd and Alexander the Great, catalogs in great detail Maḥmūd’s voyage to and from Somanāt, with a similar concluding prayer for Maḥmūd. Using ʿUnṣurī’s panegyric, I will explore an ironizing of intradistich agreement and metapoetic balance; with Farrukhī’s panegyric, I offer examples of how interdistich agreement and evidentiary agreement are ironized.Footnote ⁵⁸ In neither of these panegyrics, to be sure, is there an endorsement or deferral of Maḥmūd’s legitimacy. He is delegitimated in both.

ʿUnṣurī’s panegyric predominantly praises Maḥmūd as someone who reconstitutes a set of categories, such as good–evil, bounty–dearth, and construction–destruction, by his very person: Maḥmūd becomes the figure of the positive aspect of these binaries. Yet, a closer analysis of the individual distichs in this panegyric betray Maḥmūd as the principle of mutability par excellence, to the point of being unstable and ineffectual. Many of the distichs in this panegyric exhibit antimetabole, between each hemistich, producing a sense of apparent change without a concomitant essential change. For instance, the speaker proclaims:

When, by Maḥmūd’s favor, the “faithless … becomes faithful,” the faithful whom he opposes becomes faithless. Prima facie, Maḥmūd effects a transformation in the categories of faithful and faithless, whereby he emerges as the locus of faith. At the same time, this transformation is limited to the inversion of faith and faithless, while retaining the two categories otherwise: the change in appearance is undergirded by a structural continuity. The persistence of a categorial infrastructure undermines Maḥmūd’s effectivity on an essential level.

One might object to this reading and note that a laudatory implication obtains in the alignment of faith with Maḥmūd. Although that may be the case in the preceding distich, the chiastic logic on which it relies recurs throughout ʿUnṣurī’s panegyric, with more obviously auto-deconstructive consequences:

Maḥmūd levels the rampart of Alexander to a flat plain and then turns a flat plain into the just-destroyed rampart. This action is circular: a transformative veneer collapses into a zero-sum cycle of destruction and reconstruction, for nothing is gained by leveling the rampart only to reconstruct it immediately thereafter. What appears as a transformation, from destruction (of a prior construction) to (re)construction, is from a broader vantage point nontransformative: there was a rampart in the poetic past, as there is a rampart in the poetic present—and in both cases, even when Maḥmūd reconstructs it, it is Alexander’s rampart. This stasis is underscored by alliterative and syllabic parallelisms between the two hemistichs: the second hemistich maintains the sonic structuration of the first, just as Maḥmūd’s actions ultimately maintain that which preceded him. Apparent change need not be wholly insignificant, of course: Maḥmūd’s diverse actions impact lived experience and bear on those under his sovereignty. These actions are nevertheless best comprehended as symptoms of Maḥmūd’s restless energy or instability—traits associated with Alexander in classical Persian historiography, complementing a stasis of action with a stasis of identity, insofar as they are decoupled from essential changes. There is no greater vision, or end, to Maḥmūd’s actions, and his identity remains a purportedly superior, yet actually inferior extension of Alexander, his predecessor.Footnote ⁶⁰

The laudatory claims in the preceding distichs satisfy intradistich agreement on their semantic surface, as they communicate Maḥmūd’s ability to transform categories. Yet, the paired hemistichs semiotically cancel one another, and this semiotic stasis fails to agree with the semantic dynamism. Intradistich agreement is undermined, with the inversional structure of such distichs resolving into a static dynamism that paints Maḥmūd as destabilizing and, in the last instance, ineffectual.

Intradistich agreement is differently challenged, not through semiotic cancellation but semantic contradiction, elsewhere in ʿUnṣurī’s panegyric. While praising the expansiveness of Maḥmūd’s wisdom, ʿUnṣurī’s speaker contends:

This distich does not follow the inversional structure of many other distichs in this panegyric, but rather an amplificatory one: the turn-of-phrase zīr-i har ḥarfī is amplified into zīr-i har baitī—letter becomes couplet—as Maḥmūd’s wisdom is extolled. His wisdom grounds his worldly authority, with the signifier ʿālamī, key in both hemistichs, playing on a consonantal resonance with ʿilm. Yet, there is a veritable semantic contradiction at work in this distich: both letter and couplet lead into the identical signifier, ʿālamī, even though it cannot logically obtain that each letter contains a world and also that each couplet contains a world. The semantic contradiction of the two hemistichs fails to satisfy intradistich agreement. Despite the critique these distichs levy at Maḥmūd, ʿUnṣurī’s panegyric nevertheless satisfies generic agreement: its denoted meaning remains laudatory, prima facie, and it relies heavily on highly conventionalized stylistic techniques like tarṣīʿ, the syllabic symmetry of lexemes.Footnote ⁶²

Praise also is ironized in ʿUnṣurī’s panegyric through metapoetic imbalances that shift the object of laudation from Maḥmūd to the speaker-cum-poet: the praise of Maḥmūd is directed to the poet’s craft, which is the condition of possibility for the praiseworthy poetic figuration of Maḥmūd. The speaker begins the exordium with an image of idolatry:

The idol-making function of Naurūz’s breeze is displaced onto the speaker himself later in the poem:

The allusion to Mānī, a false prophet and master illusionist, equates the act of writing poetry to an act of dissimulation: the speaker’s wisdom organizes his verse into an alluring, but untrue, entity—which is then clarified to be an idol (the speaker’s tongue being likened to Āzar, the idol-maker). The speaker’s immediate preoccupation, of course, is the writing of his panegyric in praise of Maḥmūd, by consequence of which Maḥmūd is construed as a false idol made by the speaker qua idol-maker. Maḥmūd is reduced to the product of the poet; in contrast to the speaker’s activity, he is placed in a position of pure passivity. Come the concluding supplication, the speaker makes Maḥmūd’s well-being conditional on his own:

The speaker asserts that it is only “until,” or so long as, God’s decree shall descend on him that Maḥmūd may have a long life, victory, rejoicing, and pleasure: Maḥmūd’s rule is contingent on the speaker receiving God’s decree. That decree, which is received by the poet and not Maḥmūd, highlights the poet’s authority, with which he may (or may not) confer political legitimacy to Maḥmūd. Although the duʿā section of the panegyric offers well-wishes for Maḥmūd, it more pointedly underscores the transactional courtly relation between poet and addressee: Maḥmūd must respect his obligations to his poets, who hold power over his cultural image. Any laudatory claim in the panegyric, by the end of ʿUnṣurī’s concluding duʿā, retroactively reads as a laudation of the poet’s artifice rather than of Maḥmūd. There is a metapoetic imbalance.

Farrukhī’s panegyric, unlike ʿUnṣurī’s, is largely invested in praising Maḥmūd’s abilities in conquest through positive comparisons with Alexander the Great, the paradigmatic conqueror. The exordium begins:

The opening of the panegyric makes clear its interest in a “new” and distinct flavor that contrasts the now-“ancient” Alexandrian legends, which the speaker later maintains are verified by Providence (12). The new, as the poem reveals in its encomium, is Maḥmūd:

The deeds of Alexander, of which the speaker was already dismissive, are mocked as laughable vis-à-vis Maḥmūd’s feats. In a typological gesture, Maḥmūd perfects Alexander, of whom he is a superior iteration (a detail ironized by Alexander’s supposed prophethood and Maḥmūd’s lack thereof). That said, the praise of Maḥmūd’s feats is only intelligible in relation to the deeds of Alexander; put otherwise, Maḥmūd is praiseworthy insofar as he outdoes Alexander. Alexander necessarily haunts the speaker’s praise of Maḥmūd.

Alexander’s spectral presence reveals itself most forcefully when the speaker narrates the journey to Somanāt, in which the purported distance between the deeds of Alexander and the feats of Maḥmūd comes into question. The exordium’s assertion of Maḥmūd’s singularity is contradicted by an encomium that is decidedly Alexandrian:

This sequence of distichs exemplifies how Farrukhī’s panegyric draws on the ʿajāyib (mirabilia) genre, down to the signifier itself, to cast the path toward Somanāt as fantastic, or “so strange,” the report of the two-headed snakes being but one example. Yet, as the speaker remarks on the wonders and lessons of that wilderness, he recognizes the seeming implausibility of the whole journey: “Nobody would believe me if I spoke of it.” Simultaneous to its enunciative avowal, the act of recollection is semantically disavowed, the speaker introducing and preempting doubt to strengthen his posture as a truthful witness. The speaker’s tacit reinforcement of his reliability is not coincidental: the distichs concerned with the wilderness en route to Somanāt contradict the exordium’s disambiguation of Maḥmūd from Alexander. Maḥmūd’s feats, as they veer into the domain of fantastical, Alexandrian travel narrative, risk becoming reduced to legend just like Alexander’s deeds. The speaker further shores up his reliability by foregrounding, as common in Ghaznavid victory panegyrics, his own perceptions from amid the army, for instance in hamī nadīdam man (“I couldn't see”). His suggestion, simply, is that Maḥmūd’s journey is rooted in truth, even as it resembles Alexandrian legends. Yet, that the speaker overemphasizes his rhetorical authority when entering an Alexandrian narrative structure brings the presence of that structure into relief. In the end, there is a blurring of the distinctions between Maḥmūd and Alexander across this sequence of distichs, due to Alexander’s structural insistence in the account of Maḥmūd’s feats. Alexander, whose shortcomings were to be perfected by Maḥmūd, proves to be Maḥmūd’s absolute limit. The interdistich agreement of exordium and encomium is in turn undermined.

There are more straightforward instances of interdistich agreement being disrupted in Farrukhī’s panegyric, within a given progression of distichs rather than across entire sections of the poem. Most notably, near the end of the panegyric, the speaker describes Maḥmūd’s traversal of the sea upon his return from Somanāt:

Bar one distich, the description of the sea is the sole preoccupation of the speaker in and around this excerpted section of the panegyric. This one distich, which likens Maḥmūd to Ḥaidar, is strictly incoherent when considered in its context: through an allusion meant to exalt Maḥmūd’s bravery and victory, it produces a total interruption in what is otherwise an extended account of the sea. There is no interdistich agreement between the semantic and semiotic context of this distich and its laudatory content, by consequence of which its laudatory claim appears glaringly out of joint. The praise of Maḥmūd, articulated where it should not be articulated, ridicules itself.

Because Farrukhī’s panegyric follows Maḥmūd’s travels to and from Somanāt, it at least purports to provide an insight into his exact feats, rather than merely issuing laudatory claim after laudatory claim. What must be considered, therefore, is evidentiary agreement between demonstrable laudatory claims and their corroborations. Farrukhī’s speaker assigns two aims to Maḥmūd, one pertaining to his iconoclasm and the other to his religiosity:

For the panegyric to legitimate Maḥmūd’s identity as both iconoclast and religious ruler, it would need to corroborate his success with respect to these two aims; otherwise, Maḥmūd would appear insufficient vis-à-vis the standards established in the text for him:

Maḥmūd is presented as a “religion-fostering emperor” who obeys that which “God had ordered.” It will suffice to indicate the non-realization of his two aims—the destruction of Somanāt and the absence of the hajj—to demonstrate an incommensurability between the presentation of an ideal Maḥmūd and his non-ideal actuality. The first of these aims is literally attained in the confines of the panegyric, but is strained through the non-destruction of Manāt, the idol housed in Somanāt:

Only after uprooting Manāt, so he can “take it … to Mecca,” does Maḥmūd “set fire to the idol-house.” The idol, Manāt, around which the temple at Somanāt was erected, is separated from the temple, which is destroyed; yet, without the destruction of Manāt, as anticipated in the title of the panegyric, the extirpation of the “Hajj shrine of Hindus” remains incomplete. Further to that point, Maḥmūd’s achievement of “setting fire to the idol-house” phonetically invokes, via lexical homonymy (jinās-i lafẓ), Abraham’s father, the idol-maker Āzar: in the oral delivery of a courtly panegyric like Farrukhī’s, āzar (آذر) suggests Āzar (آزر), which is orthographically distinct by one letter, but pronounced the same. What becomes unstable is Maḥmūd’s self-proclaimed iconoclastic identity, which can only be stabilized through evidentiary agreement.

Maḥmūd saves Manāt “to take it with him to Mecca,” where one would expect him to destroy it and realize his iconoclastic duty. The full achievement of Maḥmūd’s first aim is deferred onto his second: performing the hajj. (There is, not insignificantly, also the suggestion that Manāt is to be reintroduced to the Muslim world by Maḥmūd.) Curiously, the speaker still praises the realization of Maḥmūd’s first aim despite its deferral:

There is simply insufficient corroboration around Maḥmūd’s iconoclasm in Somanāt, “one of … two great wishes,” despite the certainty of ḥāṣil būd (“He had attained”). What is at stake, then, in the anticipated destruction of Manāt during the hajj is the evidentiary dimension of the speaker’s praise. If the panegyric fails to confirm Manāt’s destruction, then the whole conquest of Somanāt would be cast in an ironic light, alongside the speaker’s initial characterization of Maḥmūd as

Without exaggeration, all of the speaker’s praise of Maḥmūd—the panegyric itself—is left in the air. There is a glaring lack of evidentiary agreement between laudation and corroboration.

Maḥmūd’s all-important pursuit of his second aim, performing the hajj, however, remains unrealized and, in its non-realization, undercuts the totality of Farrukhī’s panegyric. Following the destruction of Somanāt, Maḥmūd is said to begin his pilgrimage to Mecca:

What follows this hemistich is a travel narrative that an audience might assume leads into the hajj, where the destruction of Manāt will take place. However, the speaker soon informs the reader, rather suddenly, that the descriptions of travel are not at all related to the hajj:

The destination is Maḥmūd’s royal capital in Ghazna, not Mecca. Beyond the implication that the royal capital is to be the new residence of Manāt, there is no mention of the hajj later in the poem. In other words, Maḥmūd’s two aims are both, by the end of the panegyric, unrealized, critically ironizing his legitimacy as an iconoclastic, religion-fostering emperor. All the praise directed to Maḥmūd, which is based on his iconoclasm and religiosity, fails to receive any corroboration whatsoever in Farrukhī’s panegyric. The absence of that corroboration ironizes the structure of evidentiary agreement, by consequence of which the speaker’s praise is betrayed as a posture, and the expectation of political legitimation is displaced by delegitimation.

In both ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī’s panegyrics, praise is not neatly delivered, but strategically destabilized. Although these poems obey the generic protocols necessary to be legible as panegyrics, they simultaneously test and trouble the structures that make praise coherent, such as evidentiary agreement, intradistich agreement, interdistich agreement, and metapoetic balance. Each structure, when strained or subverted, reveals the fragility of Maḥmūd’s poetic legitimacy and, by extension, his political legitimacy. The moral-didactic or homiletic paradigm that operates in contemporary Peripatetic rhetorical theory is, in this fashion, displaced by what are accusatory, dissenting poetic artifacts, rather than invitations to moral refinement. The ironizing deployed by ʿUnṣurī and Farrukhī speak to a deeper instability at the heart of the courtly panegyric, in which the need to offer legitimation encounters and conflicts with the diverse affordances of poetic representation, and through which a polyphony of meanings exceeding the denotation of legitimation can be constructed. In this context, the figure of the sovereign becomes less a stable referent than a rhetorical object, shaped and at times undone by the poet’s craft. Such ironizing from within the machinery of praise demands a reassessment of Persian panegyric as a genre capable not only of eulogy and encomium but of tacit dissent. What one finds, in these cases, is a poetics of delegitimation masked by the idiom it rebukes.