Advice Literature in the Time of Akbar: A Sixteenth-Century mathnawī as a book of advice for the Emperor of Mughal India

This article is an attempt to add a mathnawī of the sixteenth century Mughal India composed by a Mughal poet and noble, Mīrzā Khanjar Beg, for his contemporary ruler, Akbar, to the vast treasure of what is known as the advice literature or Mirror for Princes. The article deals with the content, structure, and style of the mathanwī, and contextualises it in contemporary partisan politics along with an emphasis on its features as an advice book for rulers.

Ashraf ʿAli Thanavi

Chapter 7 looks at the sermons of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanavi, known for the Bihishti Zewar, his best-selling advice book for female readers. At first sight, Thanavi fitted perfectly into the pattern of reading reformist Islam as a contributing force both to modernity and to the disciplining project. The ideal and the practices he encouraged seemed to aim at a constant vigilance over the movements of the soul and at a control of emotional outbursts. However, in apparent contradiction, the anecdotes surrounding Thanavi’s life point to a valuation of religious passions. His sermons very often overwhelmed his audience, leaving them shaking and crying or bringing about spiritual ecstasy— features which added to his reputation as a preacher and which he did not want to censor or prevent, though like the other reformers, he was much more comfortable with men giving in to strong feeling than with emotional women. Righteous emotions and righteous behavior, for him, were intertwined with the creation of the righteous polity.

Kalila and Dimna as One of the Traditional Antecedents of Modern Classifications of Values

Kalila and Dimna, which is considered as one of the classic works of the Eastern literature, is a political morality and advice book that is still in effect thanks to the knowledge of wisdom it offers. The aim of this study is to examine this work according to the Western classifications of values (UNESCO, Rokeach, Schwartz, Spranger) since it sheds light on the present age with the wisdom knowledge it holds although it was penned centuries ago. The study was designed as qualitative research and data collection was done with the four value classifications above. During the analysis of the study data, percentage and frequency analyses were used under the content analysis. The results of the study indicate that Kalila and Dimna includes all the values contained in abovementioned classifications originating from the Western civilization.

Lennart Nilsson’s A Child Is Born: The Many Lives of a Best-Selling Pregnancy Advice Book

This article examines the circulations and transformations of photographer Lennart Nilsson’s pregnancy advice book Ett barn blir till (A Child Is Born) through its five Swedish editions from 1965 to 2009 as well as some of the translations in English and other languages. Published by Bonnier, the leading media company in Sweden, the book combines images and texts to dramatise the story of conception, foetal development and pregnancy. In particular, the aim is to explore how various commercial, cultural and material processes have co-produced and changed the identity of A Child Is Born. Inspired by research on the biography of things, the article traces the life-course of the book and the photographic material it includes. Two principles of transformation are emphasised. In the first process, the book, although undergoing significant changes, preserved a material and discursive unity and moved in relatively fixed domains. This movement occurred in relation to an origin that can be understood in terms of creativity, authorship and copyright. The second process did not require the integrity of a creative work. Rather, it was the intense features of the book and its images, their affective and iconic power, which enabled the circulations and appropriations. It is argued that Nilsson’s book could be described as a thoroughfare for images and texts in constant motion, instead of a fixed and stable object. Entangled in a culture of circulation, it has taken on a dynamic of its own and has moved as much through accident as through design. In these changes, the book has become self-reflexive in its adjustments over a range of arenas and milieus. The life of (the images in) A Child Is Born encompasses many lives, each ensnared in the trajectories and transformations of others.

Thoreau's Alternative Economics: Work, Liberty, and Democratic Cultivation

Henry Thoreau's Walden is frequently read as the tale of a disaffected Romantic individualist escaping the rigors of community and modern society to seek refuge in a pondside idyll. I argue that this is a fundamental misreading which misses the political import of the book. Walden reveals itself to be a democratic advice-book focusing on the tensions between the political ideal of free self-direction and the unfavorable work conditions that laborers often face. Thoreau's goal is to set out a strategy by which economically vulnerable citizens may enact their liberty and autonomy in threatening employment conditions. To that end, Thoreau reformats themes and practices from various ancient philosophical traditions. Walden is one of the few texts in our tradition in which strategies are thought through for the individual laborer attempting to maintain freedom while at the same time making a living. It therefore merits our closest attention.