The Sources of Imam Ali’s Intellectual Legacy
One of the reasons why so little has been written by Western scholars on the intellectual content of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib’s legacy is the controversial question of the authenticity of the extensive corpus of teachings attributed to him in the Islamic tradition. Before entering into our own reflections on the spiritual teachings within this corpus, therefore, it would be as well to begin this book with a brief look at the controversy.
In large part, the controversy has centred on the status of the Nahj al-balāgha,[1] the principal text containing the Imam’s sermons, letters and sayings. This text will be the most important of the primary sources referred to in the essays making up the present book. The Nahj was compiled by al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (d. 406/1016), a renowned Shi‘i scholar of ʿAbbāsid Baghdad.[2] He compiled the text from all the sources available to him, often travelling great distances in search of material attributed to Imam ʿAlī He collected whatever he could find in the way of quoted sermons, letters, testaments and short, aphoristic sayings, selecting for the Nahj those which he deemed to be the most important in literary terms. The result a text which is something of a patchwork, with no clear order, either in chronological or thematic terms. Some sermons are clearly fragments of larger discourses that are missing, but which are included nonetheless in the collection. But, as attested by all the greatest authorities on Arabic literature,[3] the style remains the same throughout. An unsurpassable elegance dovetails with profundity of meaning to make this text a veritable model of Arabic balāgha (eloquence) down through the ages to the present day. 2In the words of possibly the most important of all the commentators of the Nahj al-balāgha, Ibn Abi’l-Ḥadīd (d. 655/1257 or 656/1258), the Imam’s utterances were regarded as ‘below the speech of the Creator but above the speech of creatures (dūna kalām al-khāliq wa fawqa kalām al-makhlūqīn)’.[4]
Al-Raḍī’s intentions in putting this work together were literary, ethical and spiritual; he did not intend it to be a collection of teachings within the legal and formal disciplines of jurisprudence and ḥadīth. Thus, he did not provide isnāds, that is, detailed lists of the names of the transmitters of the sayings and sermons, nor did he cite the names of the sources he used, since al-Raḍī’s principal aim was to edify and inspire, not to corroborate and authenticate. For well over two centuries after its compilation, the authenticity of the Nahj al-balāgha as a text recording Imam ʿAlī’s sermons, letters and sayings was not questioned. So many of the sources from which al-Raḍī drew were sufficiently well-known that the absence of the chains of transmitters in the Nahj did not seriously affect its credibility.[5] However, with the gradual loss or disappearance of many of these sources, this shortcoming in the ‘technical apparatus’ of the work became the basis for questioning the authenticity of its attribution to ʿAlī. It was the biographer Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1283) who first cast doubt on the status of the text, stating, among other things, that it was probably al-Raḍī himself, or his brother, al-Murtaḍā, who was the actual author.[6]
One of the allegations made in this connection was that the sermons were too polished, the rhyming prose far too precise, to have been delivered ex tempore, as was claimed. But 3ʿAlī’s ability to speak spontaneously in rhyming prose (sajʿ) is corroborated, among other things, by the following report, all the more convincing for having been uttered by a known enemy of the ʿAlids. After the tragedy of Karbalā’ (61/680), where Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī and seventy-two of his closest relatives and companions were massacred, Zaynab, sister of Ḥusayn, made a fiery speech of defiance and recrimination at the court of Kūfa before the governor, ʿUbayd Allāh b. Ziyād. Although he was the object of her attack, as one of the key people responsible for the massacre, Ibn Ziyād could not refrain from admiring the power and skill of her oratory. Despite himself, he praised her speech and said, ‘She speaks in rhyming prose, even as her father did before her.’[7] Imam ʿAlī’s ability to speak spontaneously in sajʿ was thus well known, and this mode of speech made it all the more easy for his listeners to memorize even long sermons.
Over the centuries, Shi‘i scholars have assiduously rebutted the charges made against the authenticity of the Nahj; and in recent decades a great deal of erudite labour has been dedicated to proving, firstly, that the material constituting the text cannot possibly be the work of al-Raḍī—the overwhelming bulk of this material being found in sources predating him—and secondly, that most of the material can indeed be traced back, through reliable transmitters, to the Imam himself, even if the sayings do not all attain the highest status in the scale of ḥadīth authenticity, that of mutawātir (that is, a saying which is transmitted through so many chains constituted by reliable transmitters that its authenticity cannot be seriously doubted). In the recent scholarship that has been devoted to unearthing the sources of all the sermons, letters and aphorisms, two works in particular should be mentioned: Maṣādir Nahj al-balāgha wa asānīduh (The Sources of the Nahj al-balāgha and its Isnāds), by ʿAbd al-Zahrā’ al-Ḥusaynī al-Khaṭīb (Beirut, 1988), and Madārik Nahj al-balāgha (Documentary Sources of the Nahj al-balāgha), by ʿAbd Allāh Niʿma (Beirut, 1972), both of which demonstrate the immense treasury of sources from which al-Sharīf al-Raḍī drew for the Nahj, and effectively refute the allegation that he was the actual author.[8]
Summing up his considerable research on this issue, Moktar Djebli states, in his article on the Nahj al-balāgha in the Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd ed.):
It is undeniable ... that a large portion of the Nahdj (sic) could indeed be attributed to ʿAlī, especially certain historical and panegyrical passages, although it is difficult to ascertain the authenticity of the more apocryphal sections ... Moreover, it has been possible to identify a considerable number of passages, accompanied by complete isnāds, dating back to the time of ʿAlī. These texts have been recounted by ancient scholars of repute such as al-Ṭabarī, al-Masʿūdī, al-Jāḥiẓ and many others.[9]
The other principal source in this work is the Ghurar al-ḥikam wa durar al-kalim (Exalted Aphorisms and Pearls of Speech),[10] a 4remarkable compilation of short, pithy sayings ascribed to the Imam. The compiler, ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Āmidī (d. 510/1116), was reported to be a student of the great Sufi,Aḥmad al-Ghazālī—brother of the more famous Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī—and one of the teachers of Ibn Shahrāshūb (d. 588/1192), author of the important biographical text on the Shiʿi Imams, Manāqib āl Abī Ṭālib; he is thus considered an important authority within Shiʿi scholarly circles.[11] The text—the oldest manuscript of which dates back to 517/1123—consists of over ten thousand short sayings of the Imam, gathered from a variety of sources, including the Nahj al-balāgha itself; the Miʾa kalima (One Hundred Sayings) of the Imam, compiled by the foremost Arabic litterateur of the age, Jāḥiẓ (d.255/869);[12] the Tuḥaf al-ʿuqūl (Gracious Gifts of the Intellects) of Ibn Shuʿba; and the Dustūr maʿālim al-ḥikam (Register of the Characteristic Marks of Wise Sayings) of the Shāfiʿī jurist, al-Qāḍī Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Quḍāʿī (d. 454/1062). We shall also refer occasionally to such classical compilations of Shiʿi ḥadīth as al-Uṣūl min al-kāfī by al-Kulaynī and al-Tawḥīd by Ibn Bābawayh al-Ṣadūq.[13]
Whatever the status that can be attributed to these sayings, one can take the following maxim of the Imam as the key for entering into its essential message, which is completely independent of the identity of the author: ‘Consider not who said [it], rather, look at what he said.’[14] For any impartial observer and not just the spiritual seeker, the profound content and the pervasive influence of the sayings alone ‘proves’ their importance, and are thus to be taken seriously, whatever be the degree of historical authenticity ascribed to them. The fact that these teachings have been so significant for an entire spiritual tradition means that they cannot be evaluated solely on the basis of their documented historicity. For those seeking meaning within the tradition, spiritual profundity is clearly far more important a criterion than historical exactitude. The following exchange between ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī and Henry Corbin brings out this point well:
One day in the ‘60s Corbin asked ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī the following question: ‘As a leading authority on Shi‘ite philosophy and religious thought, what argument would you provide to prove that the Nahj al-balāgha was by the first Imam, ʿAlī?’ The venerable master of 5Islamic philosophy answered, ‘For us the person who wrote the Nahj al-balāgha is ʿAlī, even if he lived a century ago.’[15]
Even within an academic perspective, the role and impact of the Imam’s sayings and teachings cannot be ignored. Rather, they will be accorded a particular significance to the extent that the scholar takes an impartial, phenomenological point of view, that is, a point of view which takes seriously those elements of a given religious tradition which have, in actual fact, configured the matrices within which the quest for meaning and enlightenment takes place. This is the point of view championed by Henry Corbin, to whose penetration and elucidation of the deeper dimensions of Islamic thought all scholars and seekers alike owe an incalculable debt of gratitude. Specifically addressing the issue of the provenance of the Nahj, he writes the following, which clearly reveals the influence of the response given to him by ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī: ‘In order to understand what it contains, it is best to take it phenomenologically, that is to say, according to its explicit intention; whoever holds the pen, it is the Imām who speaks. It is to this that it owes its influence.’[16] This attitude to the Nahj al-balāgha expresses well the application of Corbin’s general approach to the sources of the Islamic intellectual tradition. These texts have to be read in depth, one has to go from the letter to the spirit, from the form to the essence; and one can only do this effectively by meditating upon the deepest expressions of spirituality within these sources, rather than restricting the scope of one’s inquiry to the historical context of the texts.
To repeat: ‘Consider not who said [it], rather, look at what he said.’ The stress here is placed on the meaning, and the meaning takes priority over the speaker; the ‘speaker’ stands for the whole gamut of historical factors that generate a ‘text’. Simply to locate a text in history—who wrote it, when and with what purpose—is not the same thing as explaining or assimilating its meaning. This is not to deny the importance of history; it is, rather, to deny that universal truths, or spiritual wisdom, can be substantially determined by something so contingent as history. The forms of their expression may change but truths of the deepest kind, pertaining to what is most profound and immutable in the human spirit, are universal and abiding in human 6experience. Truths that can change from generation to generation can hardly be called truths; they cannot be said to touch that which makes the human spirit what it is.[17]
One of Corbin’s most significant contributions to the understanding of Islamic texts in general lies in his ability to make this tradition at once accessible and challenging. Through his creative meditations and interpretations, he makes the truths of this tradition visible through the veils of time and space. Even if one may not always agree with his interpretations, he succeeds marvellously in galvanizing our awareness of the fecundity of the texts he interprets. As regards the Shiʿi tradition, he succeeds in demonstrating that the texts which lie at the core of this tradition, far from constituting a ‘register of conformist opinions’,[18] are ‘the mirror in which the Shi‘ite consciousness has revealed to itself its own aspirations’.[19]
The point of view adopted in this book, however, is not restricted to specifically Shi‘i consciousness. Despite the fact that the Nahj al-balāgha is regarded as one of the foundational texts of Shiʿi Islam, after the Qur’ān and the sayings of the Prophet, it should not be seen exclusively as a ‘Shi‘i’ text.[20] It is simply the case, historically, that the Nahj has been most influential and determinative within the Shi‘i tradition, but its role has also been of immense significance in the Sunni tradition, as we hope to show in what follows. The whole of the Imam’s corpus of sayings can—and, we believe, should—be viewed from a more universal vantage point. Rather than restricting oneself to its role within the Shi‘i tradition, it is more fruitful to reflect upon this corpus, purely and simply, as a source of wisdom, which is boundless by its very nature.
To make the author’s position clear from the outset: The aim in these essays has been to reflect upon the Imam’s sayings as an objective observer, but from ‘within’, that is, out of commitment to the spiritual principles of the Islamic faith. An attempt is made here to evaluate the sayings of the Imam,[21] both as quintessentially Islamic teachings and as universal ones, transcending the boundaries that define different religious traditions. There is no contradiction here, for that which is most essential to the spiritual message of Islam has, at the very least, certain ‘family resemblances’ with the spiritual messages of other faiths; and at the highest level, this message is identical, 7whatever be the religious form in which it is clothed: ‘And We sent no Messenger before thee but We inspired him [saying]: There is no God save Me, so worship Me’ (21: 25). It is by dint of this essential identity of the revealed religions that Muslims are enjoined not only to believe in ‘God and His angels and His [revealed] scriptures and His messengers’, but also to affirm that ‘we make no distinction between any of His messengers’ (2: 285).[22]
Even if the Imam’s sayings so often presuppose knowledge of the specific sources of the Islamic revelation, that is, the Qurʾān and the Sunna of the Prophet, one of the most remarkable aspects of the Imam’s perspective is the way in which the universal spiritual and ethical content of these sources are brought to light. Our stress on the universality of the Imam’s message does not imply the absence of highly specific features; it is intended merely to assert that the essence of the message is not to be reduced to any of the particularities pertaining to later legal or theological schools of thought. It is precisely in the intellectual, ethical and spiritual aspects of this message that the essence is found; it is in these domains, rather than those of law and theology, that Islamic discourse is most universal and intelligible to those who belong to different religious traditions.
To follow the advice given above—to consider what is said and not who said it—one should focus on the teachings of ʿAlī not because he was ‘the first Imam’ or the ‘fourth of the rightly-guided caliphs’, but because of their intrinsic worth, their intellectual profundity and spiritual fecundity. This is not to deny ʿAlī’s importance as a leader; rather, it is to appreciate that it was because of his wisdom that he was a great leader, or one of the ‘true’ leaders, as he refers to himself, one of the a’immat al-ḥaqq[23]—this, as opposed to the assertion that he must have been wise because he was a leader. He was a spiritual guide irrespective of his political role, and in a deeper sense, remains a guide now, speaking with compelling power across the centuries in a timeless dialect to all those ‘who have ears to hear’.
Notes
[1] In this work we shall be referring mainly to the first critical edition of the text of the Nahj al-balāgha, which was published by the Nahj al-balāgha Foundation in Tehran (edited by Shaykh ʿAzīzullāh al-ʿUtārdī) in 1993. All translations of the Arabic text (including the Appendices) will be by the present writer, unless otherwise stated, and will be referred to hereafter asNahj. In order to provide the reader with the context for all citations, we shall also give references to the best available complete translation of the text in English, that of Sayed Ali Reza, Peak of Eloquence (New York, 1996) which will hereafter be referred to as Peak.
[2] Al-Raḍī’s father was the great grandson of Imam Mūsā al-Kāẓim, son of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq; and his mother was the great grand-daughter of Imam ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, son of Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. His elder brother was the famous theologian, al-Sayyid al-Murtaḍā; both brothers were students of the most respected and influential Shiʿi scholar of the age, al-Shaykh al-Mufīd (d.413/1022).
[3] For an appraisal of Imam ʿAlī’s influence in this domain, see Sayyid Muḥammad Rāstgū, ‘Faṣāḥat wa balāghat-i Imām ʿAlī’, in ʿAlī-Akbar Rashād, ed., Dānish-nāmah-i Imām ʿAlī(Tehran, 2001), vol.11, pp. 11–76, which includes a series of sayings from distinguished figures of Arabic literature, such as Jāḥiẓ (d. 254/868) and Ibn Nubāta (d. 374/984–5), on the unsurpassable greatness of ʿAlī as regards rhetoric and eloquence; and Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s introduction, reprinted in the Beirut, 1996 edition of the Nahj al-balāgha, pp. 67–74. See also Muḥammad al-Rayshahrī, ed., Mawsūʿat al-Imām ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālibfi’l-kitāb wa’l-sunna wa’l-ta’rīkh (Qom, 1421/2000), vol.9, pp. 5–102, for a selection of poetry, written by poets of every century from the beginning of the Islamic era to the present, extolling Imam ʿAlī and bearing witness to his influence on them; and vol.10, pp. 261–289, for early sources referring to his instrumental role in Arabic literature, including the foundation of such disciplines as grammar.
[4] Sharḥ Nahj al-balāgha li-Ibn Abi’l-Ḥadīd (Beirut, 1965), vol.1, p. 24.
[5] See Abu’l-Faḍl Ḥāfiẓiyān Bābulī, ‘“Nahj al-balāgha”’, in AA Rashād, ed., Dānish-nāmah, vol.12, pp.22–23.
[6] Ibid., p. 15.
[7] Quoted by Jaʿfar Shahīdī on p.yā’ ṭā’ of the introduction to his Persian translation of the Nahj al-balāgha (Tehran, 1378 Sh/1999).
[8] ʿAbd al-Zahrā’ al-Ḥusaynī al-Khaṭīb, Maṣādir Nahj al-balāgha wa asānīduh (Beirut, 1988); ʿAbd Allāh Niʿma, Madārik Nahj al-balāgha (Beirut, 1972).
[9] Moktar Djebli, ‘Nahdj al-Balāgha’, EI2, vol.7, p. 904. See also Moktar Djebli, ‘Encore à propos de l’authenticité du Nahj al-balāgha!’ Studia Islamica, 75, 1992, pp. 33–56.
[10] ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Āmidī, Ghurar al-ḥikam wa durar al-kalim, 2 vols., given together with the Persian translation, under the title, Guftār-i Amīr al-mu’minīn ʿAlī, by Sayyid Ḥusayn Shaykhul-Islāmī (Qom, 2000). We shall also refer occasionally to the one-volume edition Ghurar al-ḥikam wa durar al-kalim (Qom, 2001), which appears with the Persian translation of Muḥammad ʿAlī Anṣārī. Whenever references are made to the former, it will appear as Ghurar, followed by the volume number; reference to the latter edition will appear as Ghurar(Anṣārī).
[11] See Nāṣir al-Din Anṣārī Qummī, ‘Ghurar al-ḥikam wa durar al-kalim’, in A.A.Rashād ed., Dānish-nāmah, vol.12, p. 246.
[12] It is said that Jāḥiẓ only revealed the existence of this compilation to his disciple, Aḥmad b. Abī Ṭāhir, when he was nearing his death. The latter relates that Jāḥiẓ had said to him on several occasions that there were one hundred sayings of ʿAlī, ‘each one of which was equal to a thousand sayings of the scholars of Arabic literature’. See ʿAlī Ṣadrāʾī Khuʾī, ‘Miʾa kalima’, in A.A. Rashād, ed., Dānish-nāmah, vol.12, p. 472. The opening saying of this collection is the famous sentence, ‘Were the veil to be removed, I would not increase in certitude (law kushifa’l-ghiṭāʾ, mā azdadtu yaqīnan).’
[13] Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī, al-Uṣūl min al-Kāfī(Tehran, 1418/1997–8); Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Bābawayh al-Ṣadūq, al-Tawḥīd (Beirut, 1967).
[14] Lā tanẓur ilā man qāla, wa’nẓur ilā mā qāla. Ghurar, vol.2, p. 1222, no.68.
[15] This account was given by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his ‘Reply to Zailan Moris’, in The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol.28, ed. L.E. Hahn, R.E. Auxier, L.W. Stone Jnr. (Carbondale, IL, 2001), p. 635. It is noteworthy that Nasr begins the opening essay of this important work, ‘An Intellectual Autobiography’, with a reference to Imam ʿAlī as the ‘representative par excellence of Islamic esoterism and metaphysics‘. Ibid., p. 3.
[16] Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, tr. Philip Sherrard (London, 1993), p. 35.
[17] ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ Ecclesiastes, 1: 9.
[18] For Corbin, ‘ ... a Tradition transmits itself as something alive, since it is a ceaselessly renewed inspiration, and not a funeral cortège or a register of conformist opinions. The life and death of spiritual things are our responsibility; they are not placed “in the past” except through ourown omissions, our refusal of the metamorphoses that they demand, if these spiritual things are to be maintained “in the present” for us.’ En Islam iranien (Paris, 1971), vol.1, p. 33. See our essay, ‘Tradition as Spiritual Function’, Sacred Web, no.7, 2001, pp. 37–58, for elaboration on this aspect of the meaning of tradition.
[19] Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 36.
[20] This is demonstrated, apart from other things, by the fact that the most important commentary on the text—in both the Shi‘i and Sunni traditions—is arguably that of the Muʿtazilī Sunni, Ibn Abi’l-Ḥadīd, to whom reference was made above. This is not to deny that various sayings—particularly in Sermon no.3, known as al-Shiqshiqiyya—uphold the Shiʿi point of view over the succession to the Prophet. The point is that the text should not be viewed through the prism of historical controversy and political contestation if one’s primary concern is with its spiritual message.
[21] If in the present work we refer to ʿAlī as ‘the Imam’ we do so in the most general sense of the term, that of ‘leader’, which neither excludes the specifically Shi‘i conception of his role as first Imam, nor does it necessarily imply it.
[22] See our The Other in the Light of the One: The Universality of the Qur’ān and Interfaith Dialogue (Cambridge, 2006), for discussion of this and related themes, based principally upon mystical exegesis of the Qur’ān.
[23] These ‘true leaders’ are described as those who take as sustenance for themselves no more than what the poorest of their subjects take, as will be seen below. Nahj, p. 244; Peak, p. 420.
