Discourse Analysis of Imam Ali Public Sermons in NahjulBalagha in Early Days of his Government (Case Study:Principle of Preserving Divine Limits)

This article seeks to discover and reconstruct the dominant discourse in Muslim society at the beginning of Imam Ali’s governance. To reconstructing the speeches of Ali(as) during the acute days of starting a new way of governing the society implies passing away from the first meaning of his propositions toward the level of concealed political indications within the texts. At that level, one can discover the sociopolitical context of the texts that forms the beliefs and practices of people as the direct audiences of Ali(as)’s speeches. We concentrated on the most repeated principle in his speeches that can be called as the principle of maintaining God’s Limits. A critical discourse analyze of Ali(as)’s public speeches during his first days of ruling uncovers the dominant discourse in his society and how he has used »speaking« as a tool to struggle against that discourse, and to develop a different religious political discourse. The dominant discourse at that time shows deviations from Qur’an and the prophetic tradition, twentyfive years after the demise of the Prophet (PBUH). At the beginning of his government, Ali endeavored to reform these deviations with his special discourse which is characterized by his verbal and behavioral commitment to the book and tradition of the Prophet. In this research, parts of Ali's speech in NahjulBalagha, which are of general aspect and have been delivered in Dhu alHijjah 35 AH, have been examined by the method of »critical discourse analysis«, focusing on principle of maintaining God’s limits. The results show that Ali's discourse is first and foremost based on awakening the society and making people aware. Then his discourse indicates his motivation for competency, peoplecenteredness, equality of all in public property, as well as affection and mercy _whereas the discourse governing the atmosphere of society is exactly the opposite of the discourse of Ali (AS)