Moving Beyond the Conventional Image of Nahj al-Balagha

The Evolution and Legacy of "A Journey Through Nahj al-Balagha":

The governing logic of the book A Journey Through Nahj al-Balagha is centered on defamiliarizing the publicized image of this profound work, a goal that Shahid Motahhari pursues by candidly admitting his own past unfamiliarity with its world. He writes that despite the name of Nahj al-Balagha being the most frequent title he encountered after the Qur'an, he must confess to being a stranger to its depths just like many of his peers in the seminary. Throughout this work, Motahhari explains the messages of Nahj al-Balagha for the general public in an effort to bridge the gap between people and the text through seven core themes encompassing A Wondrous Book, Theology and Metaphysics, Spirituality and Worship, Governance and Justice, The Ahl al-Bayt and the Caliphate, Preaching and Wisdom, and The World and Worldliness. The origins of these insights date back to a series of lectures delivered at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad which were later published as articles in the journal Lessons from the School of Islam before being meticulously categorized and released as a comprehensive book in 1974. Since then, the book has achieved remarkable success with seventy reprints and numerous translations into languages such as Arabic, Azeri Turkish, Urdu, English, and Russian, while an audio version has also been made available to ensure its accessibility for everyone.

A Journey to Isfahan

The spark for researching Nahj al-Balagha was ignited in Shahid Motahhari’s mind during his trip to Isfahan where he attended the lectures of Ayatollah Ali Shirazi Isfahani. In the book’s introduction, Motahhari explains that participating in these classes made him realize that despite hearing the name of Nahj al-Balagha since childhood, he remained a stranger to it and that the spiritual world he had constructed for himself was entirely different from the world of this sacred text. Motahhari writes that while such a lack of recognition would be personal if it were limited to him, the true issue lies in the fact that the broader Islamic society does not know this book and that its spirit and content remain hidden from everyone. In A Journey Through Nahj al-Balagha, the author strives to provide the reader with direct access to this spirit and content because he considers both delving deep into the messages of the book and conducting scholarly research into its documents and sources to be essential requirements for the modern era. Although Motahhari’s original plan for the book included more than fourteen chapters, he notes in the introduction that due to other commitments, he was only able to complete seven sections, leaving his initial grand design unfinished.

Critiques and Perspectives

Certain critiques have also been directed toward this work, including those from the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who considers the book’s categorization to be less than comprehensive. In a speech delivered in 1980, he remarked that while several individuals have attempted to categorize the Nahj al-Balagha, these efforts—including the work of the late Motahhari in A Journey Through Nahj al-Balagha—remain introductory and preliminary rather than complete. He further explained that Motahhari did not technically categorize the entire Nahj al-Balagha but instead selected specific themes for what he himself described as a brief exploration, elaborating on each topic by integrating his own understanding with other Islamic intellectual sources while supporting his arguments with citations from the text, a method which constitutes a form of thematic grouping rather than an exhaustive classification. Additionally, the writer and researcher Hossein Hashem-Nezhad regards A Journey Through Nahj al-Balagha as the finest existing resource for understanding the book in the pursuit of an ideal society, yet he points out that the prose in the two middle chapters is particularly dense and challenging. He emphasizes that the complexity of the language in those specific sections makes them primarily accessible to doctoral students of philosophy rather than a general audience.

Shahid Motahhari’s Self-Critique

In the book’s introduction, Shahid Motahhari promotes a spirit of self-criticism by describing A Journey Through Nahj al-Balagha as merely a "glance" or a "brief excursion" rather than a definitive research project. He argues that true research requires a collective effort to reach a deep and precise understanding of the content of Nahj al-Balagha and the school of thought of Imam Ali (AS), especially since investigating the documents and sources of the text is a task beyond the capacity of a single individual. Motahhari was the first to call his own work non-comprehensive, believing that it does not encompass all the themes within Nahj al-Balagha even though it covers vital topics such as monotheism, theology, worship, the concepts of asceticism and piety, the meaning of worldliness and liberty, justice, insights into the life of the Infallibles (AS), and aspects of anthropology. Furthermore, the Binesh-e Motahhar Study Project has published A Journey Through Nahj al-Balagha as an educational text structured into twenty-two lessons titled A Path to Nahj al-Balagha by Seyyed Mohammad Saleh Hashemi Golpayegani. This version provides an overview of the study project itself while outlining a comprehensive schedule for the study, discussion, and teaching of Motahhari’s original insights.