Abstract:
One of the challenging issues that has been frequently studied is the way Imām ‘Alī (a) addresses women in Nahj al-balāgha. Amina Inloes, the contemporary American researcher of Islam compares these statements with the qur’ānic discourse and early Shī‘a Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays. She believes that these statements are in conflict with the significations of the Qur’ān and the early books in terms of chain of transmission and content. From her viewpoint, these statements have entered the Muslim books after the Translation Movement under the influence of Greek philosophers such as Aristotle. She deems that as the general content of Nahj al-balāgha contradicts those cases, it can be concluded that those concepts are the cultural-religious reflections of Sayyid Raḍī’s era that have been attributed to Imām ‘Alī (a) after his demise. Although this is an interesting opinion, it suffers from some shortcomings such as limiting its sources to Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays, ignoring other historical and biographical books, and ignoring to explain the process of the entrance of these statements to Shī‘a texts and the way they turned into the dominant paradigm.
Machine summary:
Phd Student of the Qur’ān and Ḥadīth Sciences, Faculty of Islamic Theology, Farabi Campus University of Tehran, Qom, Iran (Received: February 15, 2020 ; Revised: May 30, 2020 ; Accepted: June 11, 2020) Abstract One of the challenging issues that has been frequently studied is the way Imām ‘Alī (a) addresses women in Nahj al-balāgha.
The article “An extra- religious analysis of the blaming reports of women in Nahj al-balāgha” by Nigār Dhīlābī and Marḍīyya Muḥaṣṣiṣ proves that these narrations lack authoritative chains of transmission and states that the content of these narrations is congruent with a multitude of similar propositions in the literary texts of the 4th and 5th century LH onward, and that this degrading viewpoint to women can be understood in the light of the cultural requirements of that era.
The evaluation of Inloes’ opinions Although Inloes has tried to examine the closest work to that historical era in the Shī‘a sphere and believes that studying it familiarizes us with the Prophet’s (s) era, it seems that limiting her investigations to a doubted source is insufficient and it is necessary to complete her work through the examination of other sources such as Biḥār al-Anwār, Alām al- isā al- M mināt, Tārīkh al-Rusul wa al-Mulūk, etc.