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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A History of Muslim Philosophy Volume 1, Book 3 Chapter 38: Zizam Al-Mulk Tusi Nizam al-Mulk Tusi was born in 408/1018[^1] and died in 485/1092. He was not only a minister of the Saljuqs for the last 30 years of his life, a scholar,[^2] and a patron of arts and sciences, but also the founder[^3] of the famous university styled after his name the Nizamiyyah .

He lived in an age which witnessed the lowest degradation of the caliphate, following its transformation during a period of three centuries,[^4] from a democracy into an autocracy and from autocracy into a mere puppetry in the hands of powerful masters.

That period also saw the fall of the Ghaznawid Empire and the Buwaihid Kingdom, and the rise of the Saljuqs after their victory over the Ghaznawids in 431/1040, when their nomadic life changed into the life of a gigantic empire, extending from the Oxus and Jaxartos to the Bosphorus. It was an age of change and fusion of social and political ideas and institutions, especially in that part of the Muslim world in which Nizam al-Mulk lived and worked.

The rise of the Persian element in political power in the early period of the ‘Abbasids was followed by a gradual revival of the Persian political institutions under the patronage of the Samanids, the Ghaznawids, and then of the Saljuqs. These institutions in their turn, together with their theoretical foundations, came to be assimilated by Muslim thought.

For this assimilation, no battle of ideas was ever fought, it came as a process of cultural development in which Nizam al-Mulk stood as one of the representatives of Persian culture, with a bias towards Islamic thought. Nizam al-Mulk was not really his name. It was a title of honour conferred upon him by his Saljuq master, Alp Arslan, after his appointment as a minister.

His name was Abu ‘Ali Hassan, and his father’s name was Abu al-Hassan ‘Ali, who belonged to a family of landowners (dihqans) [^5]of Radhkan,[^6] a small town in the suburb of Tus where Nizam al-Mulk was born.