نشریه پژوهش های نهج البلاغه
سال بیست و دوم شماره 4 (پیاپی 79، زمستان 1402)

Character education is one of the most critical and common approaches to moral education in the West, which is more comprehensive and less defective in paying attention to different aspects of personality, behaviour, and methods compared to other cases. Nevertheless, based on the various foundations of Islamic values and Western philosophical schools, this question arises that whether the character education approach is suitable for Islamic societies and necessary for comprehensiveness. Since the moral and value teachings of Nahj al-Balaghah are an approach in moral education that follows the foundations of Islamic values, it has been used in this research to examine and criticize this approach. Therefore, this research aims to investigate and criticize the character education approach from the perspective of Nahj al-Balaghah to indicate different aspects of personality, character, and the methods used. This research is practical in terms of its purpose and has been done with a qualitative approach and analytical-critical method. The study results indicate that despite the relative comprehensiveness of the character education approach from the point of view of paying attention to different aspects of character and behavior, it has some problems based on Nahj al-Balaghah. Although the methods presented in it are beneficial, they cannot necessarily lead to desirable results.

The contemporary metaphor theory is based on the belief that the system of human understanding and perception is based on metaphor, which is entirely involuntarily mixed with human daily life. In this approach, it is considered a part of human life. So, metaphors are not only a pure linguistic function but also an essential tool for understanding abstract and intangible things in the human mind, and their scope of work and influence is not at the level of words but in the depth of meaning and concepts. Since part of the language structure of religious texts, such as Nahj al-Balaghah, contains metaphors, and the metaphors of this religious text are far beyond linguistic and literary metaphors, this research aims to find abstract metaphors of "sadness and "happiness". In the present study, by reading, searching, and examining the translated text of Nahj al-Balaghah, some sadness and happiness words and their synonyms were found, and some contained conceptual metaphors. Therefore, the words containing the conceptual metaphor of sadness and happiness were chosen and explained according to the theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). As a result, metaphorical mappings were obtained, such as sadness is substance, sadness is a living thing, sadness is fire, sadness is a fluid, sadness is destructive, sadness is dust, sadness is clothes, and the mappings of happiness is the object, happiness is a living being.

Nahj al-Balaghah is undoubtedly the most comprehensive book after the Qur'an, which can be considered a human guide in all aspects of life and can be responsible for guiding humanity in various fields. This precious book contains a wide range of abstract concepts that cannot be expressed in everyday language, and to make the subject understandable to the audiences, appropriate linguistic tools must be used, among which metaphor is one of the most widely used tools. Imam Ali (AS) sometimes used illocutionary acts in his words to encourage the audiences to do good things and to warn them about evil deeds. Therefore, the present study tries to extract those sentences with metaphorical structures responsible for conveying abstract concepts from Nahj al-Balaghah sermons and analyze them based on cognitive metaphor. The research results indicate that Imam Ali (AS) conceptualizes the destination area using maps taken from everyday life that everyone can understand and uses various cognitive metaphors based on the audience's knowledge and understanding of the target concept.

One of the manifestations of the caliphate of Amir al-Mu'minin (AS) is his battles and how he interacted with the non-conformists of that era. Some of the events of these battles need to be explored to clarify their different angles. Narratology and the use of new sciences can help to explain these events. Among the theorists of this field is Algirdas Julien Greimas, who considers the texture of the narrative to be close to the grammatical form of the language and, through ignoring the difference in the content of the story, considers it to have a general shape. To interpret the narrative, Greimas introduces a general plan with six actants to clarify its hidden angles for the audience. This article tries to use the descriptive-analytical method to implement the various elements of this six-part model on Nahj al-Balaghah's narration of Jamal's battle and present a structured understanding of the events of this combat. The results of this implementation show that Nahjul-Balaghah has included significant expressions in all six parts of Greimas'model. The exploration of the propositions of Nahj al-Balaghah shows that the main actants were Talha and Zubair, and other people's actions revolved around their movements and behaviour.

Due to the social nature of human beings, the foundations of his personality are formed in society. The activist manifests these principles through behavior and speech in various social, political, religious, cultural, ethical, historical, and economic fields. In this way, the framework of the individual's relationship with others is formed. Therefore, knowing personality dimensions play a significant role in creating behavioral and speech patterns. Social semiotics has a two-way view of human beings and their social relationships and is a knowledge for decoding personality's hidden and complicated dimensions. Nahj al-Balaghah is one of the richest sources that looks at different aspects of personality dimensions; therefore, the present essay aims to investigate the positive and negative personality traits of "Malek-Ashtar and Amr ibn al-As" in Nahj al-Balaghah with a social semiotic approach. Perfectionism is a common goal in two personality dimensions, with the difference that Malik Ashtar's actions to achieve this goal are based on his religious identity and pious tendencies, but Amr ibn al-As sees perfection in acquiring worldly values.

One of the disadvantages of power in societies is the ruler's autocracy and boundless domination, which causes oppression, injustice, and rights violations of subjects and causes suffocation and frustration in the general public, particularly the weaker classes of people. Acquaintance with the lofty and sublime thoughts of Amir al-Mu'minin Ali (AS) and paying attention to his style of government will lead to the limitation of power. These limits and boundaries are based on the theoretical foundations of Islam. On one hand, define the general principles of the ruler's movement and on the other hand, represent the red lines that should not be crossed. The laws recognized by Imam Ali (AS) play a reference role in determining the methods. With the help of these laws, every influential person can be bound to act based on justice and save humanity from aggression and bloodshed. The present article, with a descriptive-analytics method based on Nahj al-Balaghah traditions and the historical-political atmosphere of the era of Amir al-Mu'minin Ali (AS), extracted the technique of good governance, which is based on justice and derived from the sovereignty of God. This type of governance is based on the three foundations of good planning and time and space management. and the combination of hard and soft power. The general lines of the Imam's governance include God-centeredness, religion-centeredness, justice-centeredness, moderation, faithfulness, and truth. His red lines are in the exercise of power, tyranny, force and violence, reproduction, exclusivity, and boasting.

Today, due to its divine source, Nahj al-Balaghah has a special place in the hearts of Persian-speaking people, especially Iranians. Undoubtedly, educated translators and interpreters have played a significant role in this field. Nevertheless, Nahj al-Balaghah is unknown to most Persian-speaking audiences because the teachings of this precious book have not been transferred to them as they should have been. The most important reasons are the richness of Imam Ali's words, the heaviness of the original text, the underuse of some terms, the lack of professional experts, and the weakness of some translators in fulfilling their professional mission. On the other hand, relying on the traditional advertising method, not using today's messaging tools such as virtual platforms, satellites, etc., and not categorizing Nahj al-Balaghah's studies and sciences has led to the dispersion of the audience. Not knowing the audience and not classifying them in terms of their age and level of knowledge has also caused repulsion, especially among young people. In this article, the author tries to provide a correct and constructive context for transferring the valuable teachings of Nahj al-Balaghah using an analytical-theoretical method and by presenting scientific and practical solutions.

The impact of speech on the listener's soul and the creation of specific changes in his inner being is one of the criteria by which the beauty of speech is also measured. Early and late rhetoricians have pointedly and explicitly discussed this criterion for measuring the beauty of words. According to friends and enemies, Amir al-Mu'minin, peace be upon him, is one of the great talkers of history. His words, in addition to the realm of thought, have also affected the inner realms of the audience. This research has been organized with the library method and by searching historical, literary, and hadith sources to investigate what effect the words of Amir al-Mu'minin, particularly those collected in Nahj al-Balaghah, have on the lives of the audience. By analyzing the data and categorizing the audiences who were influenced by the words of Imam, it was concluded that in terms of the effective aesthetic, the words of Amir al-Mu'minin (PBUH) are at their peak because they can influence both the indirect and direct audiences, even if they have not sufficient inner preparatio.

Convergence of the people with the government is one of the strategies of the Islamic Republic to preserve and strengthen the Islamic government. This issue has been reflected in Nahj al-Balaghah, and works have been influenced by it. Among the recent influential works, Imam Khomeini's Sahifah includes statements of Imam Khomeini (RA) on the issue of people's integration with the government, and it shows that he was greatly influenced by the concepts and literature of Alavi's (PBUH) philosophy on this issue. Intertextuality is one of the new topics in literary studies that examines the relationship between two texts. Different theorists have explained this method with different origins and analyses. To present a new analysis of Imam Khomeini's adaptation and influence of Alevi thought, this research investigates the way Imam Khomeini's (RA) speech was influenced by the speech of Imam Ali (AS) in an intertextual way, based on the convergence of the people with the Islamic government. The interpretation of the two texts indicates the power and influence of the words of Amir al-Mu'minin (AS) on Imam Khomeini (RA) is proven. By analyzing the types of intertextualities of the two texts, the most frequency belongs to the thematic intertextual relations and parallel negation type. Also, Imam Khomeini (RA) used Nahj al-Balaghah in the two axes of fundamentals and practical measures to explain the convergence of the people with the Islamic government.

In the context of Nahj al-Balaghah, the ruler is the person who has the authority to manage the affairs of the society, and government orders are issued or implemented by him. This person is referred to by terms such as Amir, Imam, Waali, Wali, and today, in the political systems of the world, according to the constitutional laws of the countries, the ruler is the leader, the president, the head of the government, prime minister, king, etc. The present research hypothesizes that Nahj al-Balaghah introduced a standard personality model for the leader of the Islamic society and mentioned his unique characteristics. Corresponding to this hypothesis, the main research question is what is the model of personal competence of the Islamic ruler in Nahj al-Balaghah? Therefore, by studying Nahj al-Balaghah using a library method, the primary research information was collected, analyzed, and coded using the content analysis method. Then, the concepts are divided into nine components, including self-restraint, being people-oriented and hard-working, being honest with people, appreciating people, creating moral virtues, being respectful and friendly with people, creating vitality in society, observing religious duties and consulting with the wise, were organized and presented in the form of a model for the personal qualification of the ruler. These components were evaluated using the export scale, and the scale's result was calculated using the Friedman test. The test output showed that the component creating moral virtues has the highest frequency, with 6.03%, and self-restraint, with 4.13%, has the lowest frequency.