Nahj al-Balagha

Al-Sharif al-Radi arranged his compilation in three registers. First come the sermons and addresses, delivered, according to the attributions, from the pulpits of Medina and Kufa across Ali's caliphate and before it. Their range is the book's glory: cosmological openings on the creation of the heavens, of the ant and the locust and the peacock, described with a naturalist's wonder as proofs of the Maker; the piercing sermon known as al-Shiqshiqiyya, in which Ali reflects on the caliphates that preceded his own; laments over the killing of governors and the failures of his supporters; and the sustained meditations on death, the world's deceptions and the fear of God that made the collection a manual of piety.

The second register holds the letters and documents, among them treaties, instructions to tax collectors on gentleness with the taxed, and the long letter to Malik al-Ashtar on his appointment over Egypt, a charter of just administration, counselling mercy toward subjects, vigilance over officials, care for the poorest and suspicion of flatterers, that has been cited in modern constitutional and human-rights discourse.

The third register gathers hundreds of short sayings, aphorisms on patience, knowledge, friendship and the tongue, many of which passed into everyday Arabic. Through all three registers the recurring voice is that of power held reluctantly and weighed against justice.

Al-Sharif al-Radi, who died in 1015 CE, was a descendant of the Prophet, a leading figure of Twelver Shia Baghdad under the Buyids, and one of the finest poets of his age. He states his editorial principle in the introduction: from the vast material attributed to Ali he selected what reached the peak of eloquence, and he gave the book its title on that ground. He did not supply chains of transmission, and that silence became the centre of a long argument.

From Ibn Khallikan onward, some Sunni scholars questioned whether the contents, or which of them, genuinely go back to Ali, suggesting parts were composed by al-Radi himself or his brother al-Murtada; defenders answered by tracing individual sermons and letters to sources earlier than al-Radi, and modern scholarship of both communities treats the collection as layered, with much material attested in earlier works and some pieces of uncertain origin.

Within Shia tradition the book's authority has been continuous and immense: commentaries number in the hundreds, the most famous being that of the Mutazili scholar Ibn Abi al-Hadid in the thirteenth century, itself a mine of early history, and the modern commentary of Muhammad Abduh, the Egyptian Sunni reformer, carried the text to a wide Sunni readership. Memorised, quoted in sermons and printed constantly across the Shia world, it remains the most read Islamic book after the Quran in some communities.