حسن رضایی هفتادر - Associate Professor, Department of the Qur’ān and Ḥadīth Sciences, Faculty of Islamic Theology, Farabi Campus University of Tehran, Qom, Iran
مرضیه راجی - Phd Student of the Qur’ān and Ḥadīth Sciences, Faculty of Islamic Theology, Farabi Campus University of Tehran, Qom, Iran

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.

Alī b. Abīṭālib, Nahj al-Balāgha, Amina Inloes, Women, Mentally imperfect