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The Archeology of Knowledge

The Archeology of Knowledge

Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0-415-28752-9
English

This book is corrected and edited by Al-Hassanain (p) Institue for Islamic Heritage and Thought

The Archeology of Knowledge

Michel Foucault

Routledge

www.alhassanain.org/english

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Table of Contents

Part I Introduction 6

INTRODUCTION 6

Part II: The Discursive Regularities 18

1. THE UNITIES OF DISCOURSE 18

2. DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS 25

3. THE FORMATION OF OBJECTS 31

4. THE FORMATION OF ENUNCIATIVE MODALITIES 39

5 THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS 43

6. THE FORMATION OF STRATEGIES 49

7. REMARKS AND CONSEQUENCES 54

Part III The Statement and the Archive 59

1. DEFINING THE STATEMENT 59

2. THE ENUNCIATIVE FUNCTION 65

3. THE DESCRIPTION OF STATEMENTS 79

4. RARITY, EXTERIORITY, ACCUMULATION 88

5. THE HISTORICAL A PRIORI AND THE ARCHIVE 94

Part IV Archaeological Description 99

1. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 99

2. THE ORIGINAL And THE REGULAR 102

3. CONTRADICTIONS 108

4. THE COMPARATIVE FACTS 114

5. CHANGE And TRANSFORMATIONS 120

6. SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE 129

Part V Conclusion 144

CONCLUSION 144

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Archaeology of Knowledge

`Michel Foucault is a very brilliant writer he has a remark-able angle of vision, a highly disciplined and coherent one, that informs his work to such a high degree as to make the work sui generis original.'

Edward W. Said

`The Archaeology of Know/edge provides an unusually sharp outline of [Foucault's] theoretical stance as well as a focused critique of the history of ideas.'

Jean Claude Guedon

'A necessary guide to Foucault's often difficult ideas and to his overall historical ambition, which is to define the "soil" out of which contemporary events in a given period grow.'

The Times Literary Supplement

`No other thinker in recent history had so dynamically influ­enced the fields of history, philosophy, literature and literary theory, the social sciences, even medicine.'

Lawrence D. Kritzman

`Next to Sartre's Search fora Method, and in direct opposition to it, Foucault's work is the most noteworthy effort at a theory of history in the last 50 years.'

Library Journal

L'Archeologie du savoir first published 1969 by Editions Gallimard

English edition first published in the United Kingdom in 1972 by Tavistock Publications Limited First published by Routledge in 1989

First published in Routledge Classics 2002 by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Reprinted 2003, 2004

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor ez Francis Group © 1969 Editions Gallimard

Translation © 1972 Tavistock Publications Limited

Typeset in Joanna by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been applied for

ISBN 0—415—28752—9 (hbk) ISBN 0—415—28753—7 (pbk)

Part I Introduction

INTRODUCTION

For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjust­ments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events. The tools that enable historians to carry out this work of analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making: models of economic growth, quantitative analysis of market movements, accounts of demographic expansion and contraction, the study of climate and its long-term changes, the fixing of sociological constants, the description of techno­logical adjustments and of their spread and continuity. These tools have enabled workers in the historical field to distinguish various sediment­ary strata; linear successions, which for so long had been the object of research, have given way to discoveries in depth. From the political mobility at the surface down to the slow movements of `material civil­ization', ever more levels of analysis have been established: each has its own peculiar discontinuities and patterns; and as one descends to the deepest levels, the rhythms become broader. Beneath the rapidly changing history of governments, wars, and famines, there emerge other, apparently unmoving histories: the history of sea routes, the history of corn or of gold-mining, the history of drought and of irriga­tion, the history of crop rotation, the history of the balance achieved by the human species between hunger and abundance. The old questions of the traditional analysis (What link should be made between dispar­ate events? How can a causal succession be established between them? What continuity or overall significance do they possess? Is it possible to define a totality, or must one be content with reconstituting con­nexions?) are now being replaced by questions of another type: which strata should be isolated from others? What types of series should be established? What criteria of periodization should be adopted for each of them? What system of relations (hierarchy, dominance, stratifica­tion, univocal determination, circular causality) may be established between them? What series of series may be established? And in what large-scale chronological table may distinct series of events be determined?

At about the same time, in the disciplines that we call the history of ideas, the history of science, the history of philosophy, the history of thought, and the history of literature (we can ignore their specificity for the moment), in those disciplines which, despite their names, evade very largely the work and methods of the historian, attention has been turned, on the contrary, away from vast unities like `periods' or `centuries' to the phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity. Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogeneous mani­festations of a single mind or of a collective mentality, beneath the stubborn development of a science striving to exist and to reach com­pletion at the very outset, beneath the persistence of a particular genre, form, discipline, or theoretical activity, one is now trying to detect the incidence of interruptions. Interruptions whose status and nature vary considerably. There are the epistemological acts and thresholds described by Bachelard: they suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force it to enter a new time, cut it off from its empirical origin and its original motivations, cleanse it of its imaginary complicities; they direct historical analysis away from the search for silent beginnings, and the never-ending tracing-back to the original precursors, towards the search for a new type of rationality and its various effects. There are the displacements and transformations of concepts: the analyses of G. Canguilhem may serve as models; they show that the history of a concept is not wholly and entirely that of its progressive refinement, its continuously increasing rationality, its abstraction gradient, but that of its various fields of constitution and validity, that of its successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and matured. There is the distinction, which we also owe to Canguilhem, between the microscopic and macro­scopic scales of the history of the sciences, in which events and their consequences are not arranged in the same way: thus a discovery, the development of a method, the achievements, and the failures, of a particular scientist, do not have the same incidence, and cannot be described in the same way at both levels; on each of the two levels, a different history is being written. Recurrent redistributions reveal several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies, for one and the same science, as its present undergoes change: thus historical descrip­tions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves (in the field of mathematics, M. Serres has provided the theory of this phenomenon). There are the architectonic unities of systems of the kind analysed by M. Gueroult, which are concerned not with the description of cultural influences, traditions, and continuities, but with internal coherences, axioms, deductive connexions, compati­bilities. Lastly, the most radical discontinuities are the breaks effected by a work of theoretical transformation 'which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as ideological'.' To this should be added, of course, literary analysis, which now takes as its unity, not the spirit or sensibility of a period, nor 'groups', 'schools', 'generations', or 'movements', nor even the personality of the author, in the interplay of his life and his 'creation', but the particular structure of a given auvre, book, or text.

And the great problem presented by such historical analyses is not how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how for so many different, successive minds there is a single

1- ((footnote))

L. Althusser, For Marx, London, Allen Lane; New York, Pantheon, 1969, p. 168.

horizon, what mode of action and what substructure is implied by the interplay of transmissions, resumptions, disappearances, and repeti­tions, how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given - the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations. What one is seeing, then, is the emergence of a whole field of questions, some of which are already familiar, by which this new form of history is trying to develop its own theory: how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation) ? By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing; what is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a concept? What is a text? How is one to diversify the levels at which one may place oneself, each of which possesses its own divisions and form of analysis? What is the legitimate level of formal­ization? What is that of interpretation? Of structural analysis? Of attributions of causality?

In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favour of stable structures.

But we must not be taken in by this apparent interchange. Despite appearances, we must not imagine that certain of the historical discip­lines have moved from the continuous to the discontinuous, while others have moved from the tangled mass of discontinuities to the great, uninterrupted unities; we must not imagine that in the analysis of politics, institutions, or economics, we have become more and more sensitive to overall determinations, while in the analysis of ideas and of knowledge, we are paying more and more attention to the play of difference; we must not imagine that these two great forms of description have crossed without recognizing one another.

In fact, the same problems are being posed in either case, but they have provoked opposite effects on the surface. These problems may be summed up in a word: the questioning of the document. Of course, it is obvious enough that ever since a discipline such as history has existed, documents have been used, questioned, and have given rise to ques­tions; scholars have asked not only what these documents meant, but also whether they were telling the truth, and by what right they could claim to be doing so, whether they were sincere or deliberately mis­leading, well informed or ignorant, authentic or tampered with. But each of these questions, and all this critical concern, pointed to one and the same end: the reconstitution, on the basis of what the documents say, and sometimes merely hint at, of the past from which they eman­ate and which has now disappeared far behind them; the document was always treated as the language of a voice since reduced to silence, its fragile, but possibly decipherable trace. Now, through a mutation that is not of very recent origin, but which has still not come to an end, history has altered its position in relation to the document: it has taken as its primary task, not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what is its expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it: history now organizes the document, divides it up, distributes it, orders it, arranges it in levels, establishes series, distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not, discovers elements, defines unities, describes relations. The document, then, is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations. His-tory must be detached from the image that satisfied it for so long, and through which it found its anthropological justification: that of an age-old collective consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh its memory; history is the work expended on material docu­mentation (books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institu­tions, laws, techniques, objects, customs, etc.) that exists, in every time and place, in every society, either in a spontaneous or in a consciously organized form. The document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory; history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked.

To be brief, then, let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to `memorize' the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities. There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the condition of history, and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument.

This has several consequences. First of all, there is the surface effect already mentioned: the proliferation of discontinuities in the history of ideas, and the emergence of long periods in history proper. In fact, in its traditional form, history proper was concerned to define relations (of simple causality, of circular determination, of antagonism, of expression) between facts or dated events: the series being known, it was simply a question of defining the position of each element in relation to the other elements in the series. The problem now is to constitute series: to define the elements proper to each series, to fix its boundaries, to reveal its own specific type of relations, to formulate its laws, and, beyond this, to describe the relations between different series, thus constituting series of series, or `tables': hence the ever-increasing number of strata, and the need to distinguish them, the specificity of their time and chronologies; hence the need to distinguish not only important events (with a long chain of consequences) and less important ones, but types of events at quite different levels (some very brief, others of average duration, like the development of a particular technique, or a scarcity of money, and others of a long-term nature, like a demographic equilibrium or the gradual adjustment of an economy to climatic change); hence the pos­sibility of revealing series with widely spaced intervals formed by rare or repetitive events. The appearance of long periods in the history of today is not a return to the philosophers of history, to the great ages of the world, or to the periodization dictated by the rise and fall of civil­izations; it is the effect of the methodologically concerted development of series. In the history of ideas, of thought and of the sciences, the same mutation has brought about the opposite effect; it has broken up the long series formed by the progress of consciousness, or the tele­ology of reason, or the evolution of human thought; it has questioned the themes of convergence and culmination; it has doubted the possi­bility of creating totalities. It has led to the individualization of differ­ent series, which are juxtaposed to one another, follow one another, overlap and intersect, without one being able to reduce them to a liner schema. Thus, in place of the continuous chronology of reason, which was invariably traced back to some inaccessible origin, there have appeared scales that are sometimes very brief, distinct from one another, irreducible to a single law, scales that bear a type of history peculiar to each one, and which cannot be reduced to the general model of a consciousness that acquires, progresses, and remembers.

Second consequence: the notion of discontinuity assumes a major role in the historical disciplines. For history in its classical form, the discontinuous was both the given and the unthinkable: the raw material of history, which presented itself in the form of dispersed events - decisions, accidents, initiatives, discoveries; the material, which, through analysis, had to be rearranged, reduced, effaced in order to reveal the continuity of events. Discontinuity was the stigma of temporal dislocation that it was the historian's task to remove from history. It has now become one of the basic elements of historical analysis. Its role is threefold. First, it constitutes a deliberate operation on the part of the historian (and not a quality of the material with which he has to deal): for the must, at least as a systematic hypothesis, distinguish the possible levels of analysis, the methods proper to each, and the periodization that best suits them. Secondly, it is the result of his description (and not something that must be eliminated by means of his analysis) : for he is trying to discover the limits of a process, the point of inflexion of a curve, the inversion of a regulatory movement, the boundaries of an oscillation, the threshold of a function, the instant at which a circular causality breaks down. Thirdly, it is the concept that the historian's work never ceases to specify (instead of neglecting it as a uniform, indifferent blank between two positive figures) ; it assumes a specific form and function according to the field and the level to which it is assigned: one does not speak of the same discontinuity when describing an epistemological threshold, the point of reflexion in a population curve, or the replacement of one technique by another. The notion of discontinuity is a paradoxical one: because it is both an instrument and an object of research; because it divides up the field of which it is the effect; because it enables the historian to individualize different domains but can be established only by comparing those domains. And because, in the final analysis, perhaps, it is not simply a concept present in the discourse of the historian, but something that the historian secretly supposes to be present: on what basis, in fact, could he speak without this discontinuity that offers him history - and his own history - as an object? One of the most essential features of the new history is probably this displacement of the discontinuous: its transference from the obstacle to the work itself; its integration into the discourse of the historian, where it no longer plays the role of an external condition that must be reduced, but that of a working concept; and therefore the inversion of signs by which it is no longer the nega­tive of the historical reading (its underside, its failure, the limit of its power), but the positive element that determines its object and validates its analysis.

Third consequence: the theme and the possibility of a total history begin to disappear, and we see the emergence of something very dif­ferent that might be called a general history. The project of a total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle - material or spiritual - of a society, the significance com­mon to all the phenomena of a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion - what is called metaphorically the `face' of a period. Such a project is linked to two or three hypotheses; it is supposed that between all the events of a well-defined spatio-temporal area, between all the phenomena of which traces have been found, it must be possible to establish a system of homogeneous relations: a network of causality that makes it possible to derive each of them, relations of analogy that show how they symbolize one another, or how they all express one and the same central core; it is also supposed that one and the same form of historicity operates upon economic structures, social institutions and customs, the inertia of mental attitudes, technological practice, polit­ical behaviour, and subjects them all to the same type of transform­ation; lastly, it is supposed that history itself may be articulated into great units - stages or phases - which contain within themselves their own principle of cohesion. These are the postulates that are challenged by the new history when it speaks of series, divisions, limits, differ­ences of level, shifts, chronological specificities, particular forms of rehandling, possible types of relation. This is not because it is trying to obtain a plurality of histories juxtaposed and independent of one another: that of the economy beside that of institutions, and beside these two those of science, religion, or literature; nor is it because it is merely trying to discover between these different histories coinci­dences of dates, or analogies of form and meaning. The problem that now presents itself - and which defines the task of a general history - is to determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between these different series; what vertical system they are capable of forming; what interplay of correlation and dominance exists between them; what may be the effect of shifts, different temporalities, and various rehandlings; in what distinct totalities certain elements may figure simultaneously; in short, not only what series, but also what 'series of series' - or, in other words, what 'tables' it is possible to draw up. A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre - a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a dispersion.

Fourth and last consequence: the new history is confronted by a number of methodological problems, several of which, no doubt, existed long before the emergence of the new history, but which, taken together, characterize it. These include: the building-up of coherent and homogeneous corpora of documents (open or closed, exhausted or inexhaustible corpora), the establishment of a principle of choice (according to whether one wishes to treat the documentation exhaust­ively, or adopt a sampling method as in statistics, or try to determine in advance which are the most representative elements) ; the definition of the level of analysis and of the relevant elements (in the material stud-ied, one may extract numerical indications; references - explicit or not - to events, institutions, practices; the words used, with their grammat­ical rules and the semantic fields that they indicate, or again the formal structure of the propositions and the types of connexion that unite them); the specification of a method of analysis (the quantitative treatment of data, the breaking-down of the material according to a number of assignable features whose correlations are then studied, interpretative decipherment, analysis of frequency and distribution); the delimitation of groups and sub-groups that articulate the material (regions, periods, unitary processes) ; the determination of relations that make it possible to characterize a group (these may be numerical or logical relations; functional, causal, or analogical relations; or it may be the relation of the 'signifier' (signifiant) to the 'signified' (signifie).

All these problems are now part of the methodological field of his-tory. This field deserves attention, and for two reasons. First, because one can see to what extent it has freed itself from what constituted, not so long ago, the philosophy of history, and from the questions that it posed (on the rationality or teleology of historical development (deve­nir), on the relativity of historical knowledge, and on the possibility of discovering or constituting a meaning in the inertia of the past and in the unfinished totality of the present). Secondly, because it intersects at certain points problems that are met with in other fields - in linguistics, ethnology, economics, literary analysis, and mythology, for example. These problems may, if one so wishes, be labelled struc­turalism. But only under certain conditions: they do not, of themselves, cover the entire methodological field of history, they occupy only one part of that field - a part that varies in importance with the area and level of analysis; apart from a number of relatively limited cases, they have not been imported from linguistics or ethnology (as is often the case today), but they originated in the field of history itself - more particularly, in that of economic history and as a result of the questions posed by that discipline; lastly, in no way do they authorize us to speak of a structuralism of history, or at least of an attempt to overcome a 'conflict' or 'opposition' between structure and historical develop-ment: it is a long time now since historians uncovered, described, and analysed structures, without ever having occasion to wonder whether they were not allowing the living, fragile, pulsating 'history' to slip through their fingers. The structure/development opposition is relevant neither to the definition of the historical field, nor, in all probability, to the definition of a structural method.

This epistemological mutation of history is not yet complete. But it is not of recent origin either, since its first phase can no doubt be traced back to Marx. But it took a long time to have much effect. Even now - and this is especially true in the case of the history of thought - it has been neither registered nor reflected upon, while other, more recent transformations - those of linguistics, for example - have been. It is as if it was particularly difficult, in the history in which men retrace their own ideas and their own knowledge, to formulate a general theory of discontinuity, of series, of limits, unities, specific orders, and differen­tiated autonomies and dependences. As if, in that field where we had become used to seeking origins, to pushing back further and further the line of antecedents, to reconstituting traditions, to following evo­lutive curves, to projecting teleologies, and to having constant recourse to metaphors of life, we felt a particular repugnance to con­ceiving of difference, to describing separations and dispersions, to dissociating the reassuring form of the identical. Or, to be more pre­cise, as if we found it difficult to construct a theory, to draw general conclusions, and even to derive all the possible implications of these concepts of thresholds, mutations, independent systems, and limited series - in the way in which they had been used in fact by historians. As if we were afraid to conceive of the Other in the time of our own thought.

There is a reason for this. If the history of thought could remain the locus of uninterrupted continuities, if it could endlessly forge con­nexions that no analysis could undo without abstraction, if it could weave, around everything that men say and do, obscure synthesis that anticipate for him, prepare him, and lead him endlessly towards his future, it would provide a privileged shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness. Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject - in the form of historical conscious­ness - will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode. Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought. In this system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness.

In various forms, this theme has played a constant role since the nineteenth century: to preserve, against all decentrings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of anthropology and humanism. Against the decentring operated by Marx - by the historical analysis of the relations of production, economic determinations, and the class struggle - it gave place, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to the search for a total history, in which all the differences of a society might be reduced to a single form, to the organization of a world-view, to the establishment of a system of values, to a coherent type of civiliza­tion. To the decentring operated by the Nietzschean genealogy, it opposed the search for an original foundation that would make ration­ality the telos of mankind, and link the whole history of thought to the preservation of this rationality, to the maintenance of this teleology, and to the ever necessary return to this foundation. Lastly, more recently, when the researches of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and eth­nology have decentred the subject in relation to the laws of his desire, the forms of his language, the rules of his action, or the games of his mythical or fabulous discourse, when it became clear that man himself, questioned as to what he was, could not account for his sexuality and his unconscious, the systematic forms of his language, or the regular­ities of his fictions, the theme of a continuity of history has been reactivated once again; a history that would be not division, but devel­opment (devenir); not an interplay of relations, but an internal dynamic; not a system, but the hard work of freedom; not form, but the unceas­ing effort of a consciousness turned upon itself, trying to grasp itself in its deepest conditions: a history that would be both an act of long, uninterrupted patience and the vivacity of a movement, which, in the end, breaks all bounds. If one is to assert this theme, which, to the `immobility' of structures, to their `closed' system, to their necessary `synchrony', opposes the living openness of history, one must obvi­ously deny in the historical analyses themselves the use of discontinu­ity, the definition of levels and limits, the description of specific series, the uncovering of the whole interplay of differences. One is led there-fore to anthropologize Marx, to make of him a historian of totalities, and to rediscover in him the message of humanism; one is led therefore to interpret Nietzsche in the terms of transcendental philosophy, and to reduce his genealogy to the level of a search for origins; lastly, one is led to leave to one side, as if it had never arisen, that whole field of methodological problems that the new history is now presenting. For, if it is asserted that the question of discontinuities, systems and trans-formations, series and thresholds, arises in all the historical disciplines (and in those concerned with ideas or the sciences no less than those concerned with economics and society), how could one oppose with any semblance of legitimacy 'development' and 'system', move-ment and circular regulations, or, as it is sometimes put crudely and unthinkingly, 'history' and 'structure'?

The same conservative function is at work in the theme of cultural totalities (for which Marx has been criticized, then travestied), in the theme of a search for origins (which was opposed to Nietzsche, before an attempt was made to transpose him into it), and in the theme of a living, continuous, open history. The cry goes up that one is murder-ing history whenever, in a historical analysis - and especially if it is concerned with thought, ideas, or knowledge - one is seen to be using in too obvious a way the categories of discontinuity and difference, the notions of threshold, rupture and transformation, the description of series and limits. One will be denounced for attacking the inalienable rights of history and the very foundations of any possible historicity. But one must not be deceived: what is being bewailed with such vehemence is not the disappearance of history, but the eclipse of that form of history that was secretly, but entirely related to the synthetic activity of the subject; what is being bewailed is the 'development' (devenir) that was to provide the sovereignty of the consciousness with a safer, less exposed shelter than myths, kinship systems, languages, sexuality, or desire; what is being bewailed is the possibility of reanimating through the project, the work of meaning, or the move-ment of totalization, the interplay of material determinations, rules of practice, unconscious systems, rigorous but unreflected relations, cor­relations that elude all lived experience; what is being bewailed, is that ideological use of history by which one tries to restore to man every-thing that has unceasingly eluded him for over a hundred years. All the treasure of bygone days was crammed into the old citadel of this his-tory; it was thought to be secure; it was sacralized; it was made the last resting-place of anthropological thought; it was even thought that its most inveterate enemies could be captured and turned into vigilant guardians. But the historians had long ago deserted the old fortress and gone to work elsewhere; it was realized that neither Marx nor Nietzsche were carrying out the guard duties that had been entrusted to them. They could not be depended on to preserve privilege; nor to affirm once and for all - and God knows it is needed in the distress of today - that history, at least, is living and continuous, that it is, for the subject in question, a place of rest, certainty, reconciliation, a place of tranquillized sleep.

At this point there emerges an enterprise of which my earlier hooks Histoire de la folie (Madness and Civilization), Naissance de la clinique, and Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things)'` were a very imperfect sketch. An enterprise by which one tries to measure the mutations that operate in general in the field of history; an enterprise in which the methods, limits, and themes proper to the history of ideas are questioned; an enterprise by which one tries to throw off the last anthropological constraints; an enterprise that wishes, in return, to reveal how these constraints could come about. These tasks were outlined in a rather disordered way, and their general articulation was never clearly defined. It was time that they were given greater coherence - or, at least, that an attempt was made to do so. This book is the result.

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few observations.

-My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more par­ticularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances),3 a structuralist

2- ((footnote))

' Madness and Civilization, New York, Random House, 1965; London, Tavistock, 1967; The Order of Things, London, Tavistock; New York, Pantheon, 1970. A translation of Naissance de la clinique was published in 1973 (Tavistock/Pantheon).

' The English 'knowledge' translates the French 'connaissance' and 'savoir'. Connaissance refers here to a particular corpus of knowledge, a particular discipline — biology or economics, for example. Savoir, which is usually defined as knowledge in general, the totality of connaissnnces, is used by Foucault in an underlying, rather than an overall, way. He has himself offered the following comment on his usage of the terms:

'By connaissance I mean the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it. Savoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to he given to connaissance and for this or that enunciation to he formulated.'

Throughout this translation I have used the English word, followed, where the mean-ing required it, by the appropriate French word in parentheses (Tr.).

method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous trans-formation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this transformation, the problems that it raises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. But this kind of analysis is not specifically used;

-my aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural total­ities (whether world-views, ideal types, the particular spirit of an age) in order to impose on history, despite itself, the forms of structural analysis. The series described, the limits fixed, the comparisons and correlations made are based not on the old philosophies of history, but are intended to question teleologien and totalizations;

-in so far as my aim is to define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme, it is clear that the theory that I am about to outline has a dual relation with the previous studies. It is an attempt to formulate, in general terms (and not without a great deal of rectification and elaboration), the tools that these studies have used or forged for themselves in the course of their work. But, on the other hand, it uses the results already obtained to define a method of analysis purged of all anthropologism. The ground on which it rests is the one that it has itself discovered. The studies of madness and the beginnings of psychology, of illness and the beginnings of a clinical medicine, of the sciences of life, language, and economics were attempts that were carried out, to some extent, in the dark: but they gradually became clear, not only because little by little their method became more pre­cise, but also because they discovered - in this debate on humanism and anthropology - the point of its historical possibility.

In short, this book, like those that preceded it, does not belong - at least directly, or in the first instance - to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the problem of structure arose there too.

This work is not an exact description of what can be read in Madness and Civilization, Naissance de la clinique, or The Order of Things. It is different on a great many points. It also includes a number of corrections and internal criticisms. Generally speaking, Madness and Civilization accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an `experiment', thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history; in Naissance de la clinique, the frequent recourse to structural analysis threatened to bypass the specificity of the problem pre­sented, and the level proper to archaeology; lastly, in The Order of Things, the absence of methodological signposting may have given the impression that my analyses were being conducted in terms of cultural totality. It is mortifying that I was unable to avoid these dangers: I console myself with the thought that they were intrinsic to the enterprise itself, since, in order to carry out its task, it had first to free itself from these various methods and forms of history; moreover, without the questions that I was asked,' without the dif­ficulties that arose, without the objections that were made, I may never have gained so clear a view of the enterprise to which I am now inextricably linked. Hence the cautious, stumbling manner of this text: at every turn, it stands back, measures up what is before it, gropes towards its limits, stumbles against what it does not mean, and digs pits to mark out its own path. At every turn, it denounces any possible confusion. It rejects its identity, without previously stat-ing: I am neither this nor that. It is not critical, most of the time; it is not a way of saying that everyone else is wrong. It is an attempt to define a particular site by the exteriority of its vicinity; rather than trying to reduce others to silence, by claiming that what they say is worthless, I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak,

++3- ((footnote))

* In particular, the first pages of this introduction are based on a reply to questions presented by the Cercle d'Epistemologic of the E.N.S. (cf. Cahiers pour ('analyse, no. 9). A sketch of certain developments was also given in reply to readers of the review Esprit (April 1968).

and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure.

'Aren't you sure of what you're saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you're now doing: no, no, I'm not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?'

'What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persist­ently to my task, if I were not preparing - with a rather shaky hand - a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.'

Sermon 13: You are a woman's army

Condemning the people of Basrah [after the battle of Jamal]

1

ومن كلام له (عليه السلام)

في ذم البصرة وأهلها [بعد وقعة الجمل [

You were the army of a woman and in the command of a quadruped. When it grumbled you responded, and when it was wounded (hamstrung) you fled away. Your character is low and your pledge is broken. Your faith is hypocrisy. Your water is brackish. He who stays with you is laden with sins and he who forsakes you secures Allah’s mercy. It is as though I see your mosque prominent, resembling the surface of a boat, while Allah has sent chastisement from above and from below it and everyone who is on it is drowned.2

كُنْتُمْ جُنْدَ الْمَرْأَةِ، وَأَتْبَاعَ البَهِيمَةِ رَغَافَأَجَبْتُم، وَعُقِرَفَهَرَبْتُمْ. أَخْلاَقُكُمْ دِقَاقٌ وَعَهْدُكُمْ شِقَاقٌ، وَدِيْنُكُمْ نِفَاقٌ، وَمَاؤُكُمْ زُعَاقٌ المُقِيمُ بَيْنَ أَظْهُرِكُمْ مُرْتَهَنٌ بِذَنْبِهِ، وَالشَّاخِصُ عَنْكُمْ مُتَدَارَكٌ بِرَحْمةٍ مِنْ رَبِّهِ. كَأَنِّي بِمَسْجِدكُمْ كَجُؤْجُؤِ سَفِينَةٍ قَدْ بَعَثَ اللهُ عَلَيْها العَذَابَ مِنْ فَوْقِها وَمِنْ تَحتِها، وَغَرِقَ مَنْ في ضِمْنِها

Another version

By Allah, your city would certainly be drowned so much so that as though I see its mosque like the upper part of a boat or a sitting ostrich.

وفي رواية :

وَأيْمُ اللهِ لَتَغْرَقَنَّ بَلْدَتُكُمْ حَتَّى كَأَنِّي أَنْظُرُ إِلى مَسْجِدِهَا كَجُؤْجُؤِ سَفِينَةٍ، أَوْ نَعَامَةٍ جَاثِمَةٍ

Another version

Like the bosom of a bird in deep sea.

وفي رواية أخرى :

كَجُؤْجُؤِ طَيْرٍ في لُجَّةِ بَحْرٍ

Another version

Your city is the most stinking of all the cities as regards its clay, the nearest to water and remotest from the sky. It contains nine tenths of evil. He who enters it is surrounded with his sins and he who is out of it enjoys Allah’s forgiveness. It seems as though I look at this habitation of yours that water has so engulfed it that nothing can be seen of it except the highest part of mosque appearing like the bosom of a bird in deep sea.

و في رواية :

بلادكم أنتن بلاد الله تربةً: أقربها من الماء و أبعدها من السماء و بها تسعة اعشار الشر، المحتَبَس فيها بِذنبِهِ، و الخارج بِعفوِ اللهِ كأنّي أنظر الى قريتكم هذه قد طبَّقَها الماء، حتّى ما يرى منها الّا شُرُف المسجد، كأنه جؤجؤ طير في لجة بحر

Alternative Sources for Sermon 13

(1) Al-Dinawari, al-'Akhbar,153 ;

(2) al-Mas`udi, Muruj, II,377 ;

(3) Ibn Qutaybah, `Uyun, I,217 ;

(4) Ibn `Abd Rabbih, al-`Iqd, IV,328 ;

(5) al-Majlisi, Bihar, VIII,447 ;

(6) `Ali ibn Ibrahim, Tafsir,655 ;

(7) al-Tusi, al-'Amali,* 78;

(8) al-Mufid, al-Jamal,210 ,203 .

Notes

1. Ibn Maytham writes that when the Battle of Jamal ended then on the third day after it Amir al-mu'minin said the morning prayer in the central mosque of Basrah and after finishing it stood on the right side of the prayer place reclining against the wall and delivered this sermon wherein he described the lowness of character of the people of Basrah and their slyness, namely that they got enflamed at others' instigation without anything of their own and making over their command to a woman clung to a camel. They broke away after swearing allegiance and exhibited their low character and evil nature by practising double facedness. In this sermon woman implies `A'ishah and quadruped implies the camel (Jamal) after which this battle has been named the Battle of Jamal.'

This battle originated in this way that when although during the life time of `Uthman, `A'ishah used to oppose him and had left for Mecca leaving him in siege and as such she had a share in his assassination details of which would be stated at some suitable place but when on her return from Mecca towards Medina she heard from `Abdullah ibn Salamah that after `Uthman allegiance had been paid to `Ali (as Caliph) she suddenly exclaimed, "If allegiance has been paid to `Ali, I wish the sky had burst on the earth. Let me go back to Mecca." Consequently she decided to return to Mecca and began saying, "By Allah `Uthman has been killed helplessly. I shall certainly avenge his blood."

On seeing this wide change in the state of affairs Abu Salamah said, "What are you saying as you yourself used to say "Kill this Na`thal ; he had turned unbeliever." Thereupon she replied, "Not only I but everyone used to say so; but leave these things and listen to what I am now saying, that is better and deserves more attention. It is so strange that first he was called upon to repent but before giving him an opportunity to do so he has been killed." On this Abu Salamah recited the following verses addressing her:

You started it and now you are changing and raising storms of wind and rain.

You ordered for his killing and told us that he had turned unbeliever.

We admit that he has been killed but under your orders and the real Killer is one who ordered it.

Nevertheless, neither the sky fell over us nor did the sun and moon fall into eclipse.

Certainly people have paid allegiance to one who can ward off the enemy with power and grandeur, does not allow swords to come near him and loosens the twist of the rope, that is, subdues the enemy.

He is always fully armed for combat and the faithful is never like the traitor.

However, when she reached Mecca with a passion for vengeance she began rousing the people to avenge `Uthman's blood by circulating stories of his having been victimised. The first to respond to this call was `Abdullah ibn `Amir al-Hadrami who had been the governor of Mecca in `Uthman's reign and with him Marwan ibn al-Hakam, Sa`id ibn al-`As and other Umayyads rose to support her. On the other side Talhah ibn `Ubaydillah and az-Zubayr ibn al-`Awwam also reached Mecca from Medina. From Yemen Ya`la ibn Munabbih who had been governor there during `Uthman's caliphate and the former governor of Basrah, `Abdullah ibn `Amir ibn Kurayz also reached there, and joining together began preparing their plans.

Battle had been decided upon but discussion was about the venue of confrontation. `A'ishah's opinion was to make Medina the venue of the battle but some people opposed and held that it was difficult to deal with Medinites, and that some other place should be chosen as the venue. At last after much discussion it was decided to march towards Basrah as there was no dearth of men to support the cause. Consequently on the strength of `Abdullah ibn `Amir's countless wealth, and the offer of six hundred thousand Dirhams and six hundred camels by Ya`la ibn Munabbih they prepared an army of three thousand and set off to Basrah. There was a small incident on the way on account of which `A'ishah refused to advance further.

What happened was that at a place she heard the barking of dogs and enquired from the camel driver the name of the place. He said it was Haw'ab. On hearing this name she recalled the Prophet's admonition when he had said to his wives, "I wish I could know at which of you the dogs of Haw'ab would bark." So when she realised that she herself was that one she got the camel seated by patting and expressed her intention to abandon the march. But the device of her companions saved the deteriorating situation. `Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr swore to assure her that it was not Haw'ab, Talhah seconded him and for her further assurance also sent for fifty persons to stand witness to it. When all the people were on one side what could a single woman do by opposing. Eventually they were successful and `A'ishah resumed her forward march with the same enthusiasm.

When this army reached Basrah, people were first amazed to see the riding animal of `A'ishah. Jariyah ibn Qudamah came forward and said, "O' mother of the faithful, the assassination of `Uthman was one tragedy but the greater tragedy is that you have come out on this cursed camel and ruined your honour and esteem. It is better that you should get back." But since neither the incident at Haw'ab could deter her nor could the Qur'anic injunction: "Keep sitting in your houses" (33:33) stop her, what effect could these voices produce. Consequently, she disregarded all this.

When this army tried to enter the city the Governor of Basrah `Uthman ibn Hunayf came forward to stop them and when the two parties came face to face they drew their swords out of the sheaths and pounced upon each other. When a good number had been killed from either side `A'ishah intervened on the basis of her influence and the two groups agreed that till the arrival of Amir al-mu'minin the existing administration should continue and `Uthman ibn Hunayf should continue on his post. But only two days had elapsed when they made a nightly attack on `Uthman ibn Hunayf, killed forty innocent persons, beat `Uthman ibn Hunayf, plucked every hair of his beard, took him in their custody and shut him up. Then they attacked public treasury and while ransacking it killed twenty persons on the spot, and beheaded fifty more after arresting them.

Then they attacked the grain store, whereupon an elderly noble of Basrah Hukaym ibn Jabalah could not control himself and reaching there with his men said to `Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr, "Spare some of this grain for the city's populace. After all there should be a limit to oppression. You have spread killing and destruction all round and put `Uthman ibn Hunayf in confinement. For Allah's sake keep off these ruining activities and release `Uthman ibn Hunayf. Is there no fear of Allah in your hearts?" Ibn az-Zubayr said, "This is vengeance of `Uthman's life." Hukaym ibn Jabalah retorted, "Were those who have been killed assassins of `Uthman? By Allah, if I had supporters and comrades I should have certainly avenged the blood of these Muslims whom you have killed without reason." Ibn az-Zubayr replied, "We shall not give anything out of this grain, nor will `Uthman ibn Hunayf be released." At last the battle raged between these two parties but how could a few individuals deal with such a big force? The result was that Hukaym ibn Jabalah, his son al-Ashraf ibn Hukaym ibn Jabalah, his brother ar-Ri'l ibn Jabalah and seventy persons of his tribe were killed. In short, killing and looting prevailed all round. Neither anyone's life was secure nor was there any way to save one's honour or property.

When Amir al-mu'minin was informed of the march to Basrah he set out to stop it with a force which consisted of seventy of those who had taken part in the battle of Badr and four hundred out of those companions who had the honour of being present at the Allegiance of Ridwan (Divine Pleasure). When he stopped at the stage of Dhiqar he sent his son Hasan (p.b.u.h.) and `Ammar ibn Yasir to Kufah to invite its people to fighting. Consequently, despite interference of Abu Musa al-Ash`ari seven thousand combatants from there joined Amir al- mu'minin's army. He left that place after placing the army under various commanders.

Eye witnesses state that when this force reached near Basrah first of all a contingent of ansar appeared foremost. Its standard was held by Abu Ayyub al-Ansari. After it appeared another contingent of 1000 whose commander was Khuzaymah ibn Thabit al-Ansari. Then another contingent came in sight. Its standard was borne by Abu Qatadah ibn ar-Rabi`. Then a crowd of a thousand old and young persons was seen. They had signs of prostration on their foreheads and veil of fear of Allah on their face. It seemed as if they were standing before the Divine Glory on the Day of Judgement. Their Commander rode a dark horse, was dressed in white, had black turban on his head and was reciting the Qur'an loudly. This was `Ammar ibn Yasir. Then another contingent appeared. Its standard was in the hand of Qays ibn Sa`d ibn `Ubadah.

Then an army came to sight. Its leader wore white dress and had a black turban on his head. He was so handsome that all eyes centred around him. This was `Abdullah ibn `Abbas. Then followed a contingent of the companions of the Prophet. Their standard bearer was Qutham ibn al-`Abbas. Then after the passing of a few contingents a big crowd was seen, wherein there was such a large number of spears that they were overlapping and flags of numerous colours were flying. Among them a big and lofty standard was seen with distinctive position. Behind it was seen a rider guarded by sublimity and greatness. His sinews were well-developed and eyes were cast downwards. His awe and dignity was such that no one could look at him. This was the Ever Victorious Lion of Allah namely `Ali ibn Abi Talib (p.b.u.h.).

On his right and left were Hasan and Husayn (p.b.u.t.). In front of him Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah walked in slow steps carrying the banner of victory and glory, and on the back were the young men of Banu Hashim, the people of Badr and `Abdullah ibn Ja`far ibn Abi Talib. When this army reached the place az-Zawiyah, Amir al-mu'minin alighted from the horse, and after performing four rak`ah of prayer put his cheeks on the ground. When he lifted his head the ground was drenched with tears and the tongue was uttering these words: O' Sustainer of earth, heaven and the high firmament, this is Basrah. Fill our lap with its good and protect us from its evils.

Then proceeding forward he got down in the battle-field of Jamal where the enemy was already camping. First of all Amir al-mu'minin announced in his army that no one should attack another, nor take the initiative. Saying this he came in front of the opposite army and said to Talhah and az-Zubayr, "You ask `A'ishah by swearing in the name of Allah and His prophet whether I am not free from the blame of `Uthman's blood, and whether I used the same words for him which you used to say, and whether I pressurised you for allegiance or you swore it of your own free will." Talhah got exasperated at these words but az-Zubayr relented, and Amir al-mu'minin turned back after it, and giving the Qur'an to Muslim (a young man from the tribe of `Abd Qays) sent him towards them to pronounce to them the verdict of the Qur'an. But people took both of them within aim and covered this godly man with their arrows.

Then `Ammar ibn Yasir went to canvass and convince them and caution them with the consequences of war but his words were also replied by arrows. Till now Amir al-mu'minin had not allowed an attack as a result of which the enemy continued feeling encouraged and went on raining arrows constantly. At last with the dying of a few valiant combatants consternation was created among Amir al-mu'minin's ranks and some people came with a few bodies before him and said, "O' Commander of the faithful you are not allowing us to fight while they are covering us with arrows. How long can we let them make our bosoms the victim of their arrows, and remain handfolded at their excesses?"

At this Amir al-mu'minin did show anger but acting with restraint and endurance, came to the enemy in that very form without wearing armour or any arm and shouted, "Where is az-Zubayr?" At first az-Zubayr hesitated to come forward but he noticed that Amir al-mu'minin had no arms he came out. Amir al-mu'minin said to him "O' az-Zubayr, you must remember that one day the Prophet told you that you would fight with me and wrong and excess would be on your side." az-Zubayr replied that he had said so. Then Amir al-mu'minin enquired "Why have you come then?" He replied that his memory had missed it and if he had recollected it earlier he would not have come that way. Amir al-mu'minin said, "Well, now you have recollected it" and he replied, "Yes." Saying this he went straight to `A'ishah and told her that he was getting back.

She asked him the reason and he replied, "`Ali has reminded me a forgotten matter. I had gone astray, but now I have come on the right path and would not fight `Ali ibn Abi Talib at any cost." `A'ishah said, "You have caught fear of the swords of the sons of `Abd al-Muttalib." He said, "No" and saying this he turned the reins of his horse. However, it is gratifying that some consideration was accorded to the Prophet's saying, for at Haw'ab even after recollection of the Prophet's words no more than transient effect was taken of it. On returning after this conversation Amir al-mu'minin observed that they had attacked the right and left flanks of his army. Noticing this Amir al-mu'minin said, "Now the plea has been exhausted. Call my son Muhammad." When he came Amir al-mu'minin said, "My son, attack them now."

Muhammad bowed his head and taking the standard proceeded to the battle-field. But arrows were falling in such exuberance that he had to stop. When Amir al-mu'minin saw this he called out at him, "Muhammad, why don't you advance?" He said, "Father, in this shower of arrows there is no way to proceed. Wait till the violence of arrows subsides." He said, "No, thrust yourself in the arrows and spears and attack." Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah advanced a little but the archers so surrounded him that he had to hold his steps. On seeing this a frown appeared on Amir al-mu'minin's fore-head and getting forward he hit the sword's handle on the Muhammad's back and said, "This is the effect of your mother's veins."

Saying this he took the standard from his hands and folding up his sleeves made such and attack that a tumult was created in the enemy's ranks from one end to the other. To whichever row he turned, it became clear and to whatever side he directed himself bodies were seen falling and heads rolling in the hoofs of horses. When after convulsing the rows he returned to his position he said to Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah, "Look, my son, battle is fought like this." Saying this he gave the standard to him and ordered him to proceed. Muhammad advanced towards the enemy with a contingent of ansar. The enemy also came out moving and balancing their spears. But the brave son of the valiant father convulsed rows over rows while the other warriors also made the battle-field glory and left heaps of dead bodies.

From the other side also there was full demonstration of spirit of sacrifice. Dead bodies were falling one over the other but they continued sacrificing their lives devotedly around the camel. Particularly the condition of Banu Dabbah was that although their hands were being severed from the elbows for holding the reins of the camel, and bosoms were being pierced yet they had the following battle-song on their tongues: a) To us death is sweeter than honey. We are Banu Dabbah, camel rearers. b) We are sons of death when death comes. We announce the death of `Uthman with the edges of spears. c) Give us back our chief and there is an end to it.

The low character and ignorance from faith of these Banu Dabbah, can be well understood by that one incident which al-Mada'ini has narrated. He writes that in Basrah there was a man with mutilated ear. He asked him its reason when he said, "I was watching the sight of dead bodies in the battle-field of Jamal when I saw a wounded man who sometimes raised his head and sometimes dashed it back on the ground. I approached near. Then the following two verses were on his lips: a) Our mother pushed us into the deep waters of death and did not get back till we had thoroughly drunk. b) By misfortune we obeyed Banu Taym who are none but slave men and slave girls.

"I told him it was not the time to recite verses; he should rather recall Allah and recite the kalimat ash-shahadah (verse of testimony). On my saying this he saw me with angry looks and uttering a severe abuse and said, "You are asking me to recite kalimat ash-shahadah, get frightened at the last moment and show impatience." I was astonished to hear this and decided to return without saying anything further. When he saw me returning he said, "Wait; for your sake I am prepared to recite, but teach me." I drew close to teach him the kalimah when he asked me to get closer. When I got closer he caught my ear with his teeth and did not leave it till he tore it from the root. I did not think it proper to molest a dying man and was about to get back abusing and cursing him when he asked me to listen one more thing. I agreed to listen lest he had an unsatisfied wish. He said that when I should get to my mother and she enquired who had bitten my ear I should say that it was done by `Umayr ibn al-Ahlab ad-Dabbi who had been deceived by a woman aspiring to become the commander of the faithful (head of the state)."

However, when the dazzling lightning of swords finished the lives of thousands of persons and hundreds of Banu Azd and Banu Dabbah were killed for holding the rein of the camel, Amir al-mu'minin ordered, "Kill the camel for it is Satan." Saying this he made such a severe attack that the cries of "Peace" and "Protection" rose from all round. When he reached near the camel he ordered Bujayr ibn Duljah to kill the camel at once. Consequently, Bujayr hit him with such full might that the camel fell in agony on the side of its bosom. No sooner than the camel fell the opposite army took to heels and the carrier holding `A'ishah was left lonely and unguarded. The companion of Amir al-mu'minin took control of the carrier and under orders of Amir al-mu'minin, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr escorted `A'ishah to the house of Safiyyah bint al-Harith.

This encounter commenced on the 10th of Jumada ath-thaniyah, 36 A.H., in the afternoon and came to an end the same evening. In it from Amir al-mu'minin's army of twenty two thousand, one thousand and seventy or according to another version five hundred persons were killed as martyrs while from `A'ishah's army of thirty thousand, seventeen thousand persons were killed, and the Prophet's saying, "That people who assigned their affairs (of state) to a woman would never prosper" was fully corroborated. (al-Imamah wa's-siyasah; Muruj adh-dhahab; al-`Iqd al-farid; at-Tarikh, at Tabari)

2. Ibn Abi'l-Hadid has written that as prophesied by Amir al-mu'minin, Basrah was flooded twice - once in the days of al-Qadir Bi’llah and once in the reign of al-Qa'im bi Amri'l-lah and the state of flooding was just this that while the whole city was under water but the top ends of the mosque were seen about the surface of the water and looked like a bird sitting on the side of its bosom.

Sermon 14: Your land is close to the sea

This also is in condemnation of the people of Basrah

ومن كلام له (عليه السلام)

في مثل ذلك

Your land is close to the sea and away from the sky. Your wits have become light and your minds are full of folly. You are the aim of the archer, a morsel for the eater and an easy prey for the hunter.

أرْضُكُمْ قَرِيبَةٌ مِنَ المَاءِ، بَعِيدَةٌ مِنَ السَّماءِ، خَفَّتْ عُقُولُكُمْ، وَسَفِهَتْ حُلُومُكُمْ، فَأَنْتُمْ غَرَضٌ لِنَابِل، وَأُكْلَةٌ لاِكِل، وَفَرِيسَةٌ لِصائِد

Alternative Sources for Sermon 14

(1) Al-Mufid, al-Jamal,217 ;

(2) al-Waqidi, al-Jamal, see al-Mufid, op. cit.;

(3) al-Dinawari, al-'Akhbar,151 ;

(4) Ibn Qutaybah, `Uyun, I,217 ;

(5) al-Mas`udi, Muruj, II,368 ;

(6) Ibn `Abd Rabbih, al-`Iqd, II,169 .

Sermon 15: By God, even if I had found that

After returning to the Muslims the land grants made by `Uthman ibn `Affan, he said:

ومن كلام له (عليه السلام)

فيما ردّه على المسلمين من قطائع عثمان

By Allah, even if I had found that by such money women have been married or slave-maids have been purchased I would have returned it (to its owners) because there is wide scope in dispensation of justice, and he who finds it hard to act justly will find it harder to deal with injustice.

وَاللهِ لَوْ وَجَدْتُهُ قَدْ تُزُوِّجَ بِهِ النِّسَاءُ، وَمُلِكَ بِهِ الاْمَاءُ، لَرَدَدْتُهُ; فَإِنَّ في العَدْلِ سَعَةً، وَمَنْ ضَاقَ عَلَيْهِ العَدْلُ، فَالجَوْرُ عَلَيْهِ أَضيَقُ !

Alternative Sources for Sermon 15

(1) Al-`Askari, al-'Awa'il,102 ;

(2) al-Qadi al-Nu`man, Da`a'im, I,396 ;

(3) al-Mas`udi, Ithbat,120 .

Sermon 16: My word is the guarantee of my promise

Delivered when allegiance was sworn to him at Medina

من كلام له (عليه السلام)

لمّا بويع بالمدينة

وفيها يخبر الناس بعلمه بما تؤول إليه أحوالهم وفيها يقسمهم إلى أقسام

The responsibility for what I say is guaranteed and I am answerable for it. He to whom experiences have clearly shown the past exemplary punishments (given by Allah to peoples) is prevented by piety from falling into doubts. You should know that the same troubles have returned to you which existed when the Prophet was first sent.

By Allah who sent the Prophet with faith and truth, you will be severely subverted, bitterly shaken as in sieving and fully mixed as by spooning in a cooking pot till your low persons become high and high ones become low, those who were behind would attain forward positions and those who were forward would become backward. By Allah, I have not concealed a single word or spoken any lie and I had been informed of this event and of this time.

ذِمَّتي بِمَا أَقُولُ رَهِينَةٌ وَأَنَا بِهِ زَعِيمٌ: إِنَّ مَنْ صَرَّحَتْ لَهُ العِبَرُ عَمَّا بَيْنَ يَدَيْهِ مِنَ المَثُلاتِ، حَجَزَهُ التَّقْوَى عَنْ تَقَحُّمِ الشُّبُهَاتِ. أَلاَ وَإِنَّ بَلِيَّتَكُمْ قَدْ عَادَتْ كَهَيْئَتِهَا يَوْمَ بَعَثَ اللهُ نَبِيَّهُ (صلى الله عليه وآله)، وَالَّذِي بَعَثَهُ بِالحَقِّ لَتُبَلْبَلُنَّ بَلْبَلَةً، وَلَتُغَرْبَلُنَّ غَرْبَلَةً، وَلَتُسَاطُنَّ سَوْطَ القِدْرِ، حَتَّى يَعُودَ أَسْفَلُكُمْ أَعْلاَكُمْ، وَأَعْلاَكُمْ أَسْفَلَكُمْ، وَلَيَسْبِقَنَّ سَابِقُونَ كَانُوا قَصَّرُوا، وَلَيُقَصِّرَنَّ سَبَّاقُونَ كَانُوا سَبَقُوا. وَاللهِ مَا كَتَمْتُ وَشْمَةً، وَلا كَذَبْتُ كِذْبَةً، وَلَقَدْ نُبِّئْتُ بِهذا المَقامِ وَهذَا اليَوْمِ

Beware that sins are like unruly horses on whom their riders have been placed and their reins have been let loose so that they would jump with them in Hell. Beware that piety is like trained horses on whom the riders have been placed with the reins in their hands, so that they would take the riders to Heaven. There is right and wrong and there are followers for each. If wrong dominates, it has (always) in the past been so, and if truth goes down that too has often occurred. It seldom happens that a thing that lags behind comes forward.

أَلاَ وَإِنَّ الخَطَايَا خَيْلٌ شُمُسٌ حُمِلَ عَلَيْهَا أَهْلُها، وَخُلِعَتْ لُجُمُهَا، فَتَقَحَّمَتْ بِهِمْ في النَّارِ

أَلاَ وَإِنَّ التَّقْوَى مَطَايَا ذُلُلٌ(2)، حُمِلَ عَلَيْهَا أَهْلُهَا، وَأُعْطُوا أَزِمَّتَها، فَأَوْرَدَتْهُمُ الجَنَّةَ

حَقٌّ وَبَاطِلٌ، وَلِكُلٍّ أَهْلٌ، فَلَئِنْ أَمِرَ البَاطِلُ لَقَدِيماً فَعَلَ، وَلَئِنْ قَلَّ الحقُّ لَرُبَّما وَلَعَلَّ، وَلَقَلَّمَا أَدْبَرَ شَيءٌ فَأَقْبَلَ !

ash-Sharif ar-Radi says: In this small speech there is more beauty than can be appreciated, and the quantity of amazement aroused by it is more than the appreciation accorded to it. Despite what we have stated it has so many aspects of eloquence that cannot be expressed nor can anyone reach its depth, and no one can understand what I am saying unless one has attained this art and known its details.

No one appreciates it except those who know (Qur’an, 29:43)

قال السيد الشريف: وأقول: إنّ في هذا الكلام الادنى من مواقع الاحسان ملا تبلغه مواقع الاستحسان، وإنّ حظ العجب منه أكثر من حظ العُجب به، وفيه ـ مع الحال التي وصفنا ـ زوائد من الفصاحة لا يقوم بها لسان، ولا يَطَّلع فَجها إنسان، ولا يعرف ما أقوله إلاّ من ضرب في هذه الصناعة بحق، وجرى فيها على عرق، (وَمَا يَعْقِلُهَا إلاّ العَالمِونَ).

From the same Sermon

ومن هذه الخطبة

[وفيها يقسّم الناس إلى ثلاثة أصناف [

He who has heaven and hell in his view has no other aim. He who attempts and acts quickly, succeeds, while the seeker who is slow may also entertain hope, and he who falls short of action faces destruction in Hell. On right and left there are misleading paths. Only the middle way is the (right) path which is the Everlasting Book and the traditions of the Prophet. From it the sunnah has spread out and towards it is the eventual return.

شُغِلَ مَنِ الجَنَّةُ وَالنَّارُ أَمَامَهُ! سَاع سَرِيعٌ نَجَا، وَطَالِبٌ بَطِيءٌ رَجَا، وَمُقَصِّرٌ في النَّارِ هَوَى. الَيمِينُ وَالشِّمالُ مَضَلَّةٌ، وَالطَّرِيقُ الوُسْطَى هِيَ الجَادَّةُ’ عَلَيْهَا بَاقي الكِتَابِ وَآثَارُ النُّبُوَّةِ، وَمِنْهَا مَنْفَذُ السُّنَّةِ، وَإلَيْهَا مَصِيرُ العَاقِبَةِ

He who claims (otherwise) is ruined and he who concocts falsehood is disappointed. He who opposes1 right with his face gets destruction. It is enough ignorance for a man not to know himself. He who is strong rooted2 in piety does not get destruction, and the plantation of a people based on piety never remains without water. Hide yourselves in your houses and reform yourselves. Repentance is at your back. One should praise only Allah and condemn only his own self.

هَلَكَ مَنِ ادَّعى، وَخَابَ مَنِ افْتَرَى، مَنْ أَبْدَى صَفْحَتَهُ لِلْحَقِّ هَلَكَ، وَكَفَى بِالْمَرْءِ جَهْلاً أَلاَّ يَعْرِفَ قَدْرَهُ، لاَيَهْلِكُ عَلَى التَّقْوَى سِنْخ أَصْل، وَلاَ يَظْمَأُ عَلَيْهَا زَرْعُ قَوْم

فَاسْتَتِرُوا بِبُيُوتِكُمْ، وَأَصْلِحُوا ذَاتَ بَيْنِكُمْ، وَالتَّوْبَةُ مِنْ وَرَائِكُمْ، وَلاَ يَحْمَدْ حَامِدٌ إِلاَّ رَبَّهُ، وَلاَ يَلُمْ لاَئِمٌ إِلاَّ نَفْسَهُ

Alternative Sources for Sermon 16

(1) Al-Jahiz, al-Bayan, I,170 ;

(2) Ibn al-'Athir, al-Nihayah, I,132 ;

(3) al-Mufid, al-'Irshad,139 ;

(4) Ibn Qutaybah, `Uyun, II,236 ;

(5) Ibn `Abd Rabbih, al-`Iqd, II,162 ;

(6) al-`Askari, al-'Awa'il,102 ;

(7) al-Kulayni, Usul al-Kafi, I,369 and Rawdat al-Kafi, 67;

(8) al-Tusi, al'Amali, *147 .

Notes

1. In some versions after the words "man abda safhatahu lilhaqqi halaka:" the words "`inda jahalati'n-nas" also occur. In that case the meaning of this sentence would be that he who stands in face of right dies in the estimation of the ignorant.

2. Piety is the name of heart and mind being affected and impressed by the Divine Greatness and Glory, as an effect of which the spirit of man becomes full of fear of Allah, and its inevitable result is that engrossment in worship and prayer increases. It is impossible that heart may be full of Divine fear and there be no manifestation of it in actions and deeds. And since worship and submission reform the heart and nurture the spirit, purity of heart increases with the increase of worship. That is why in the Qur'an "taqwa" (piety) has been applied sometimes to fear, sometimes to worship and devotion and sometimes to purity of heart and spirit. Thus in the verse "wa iyyaya fattaqun" (and Me you fear [16:2]) taqwa implies fear, in the verse, "ittaqu'l-laha haqqa tuqatihi" (worship Allah as He ought to be worshipped [3:102]), taqwa implies worship and devotion and in the verse "wa yakhsha'l-laha wa yattaqhi faulaika humu'l-faizun" (24:52) taqwa implies purity of spirit and cleanliness of heart.

In the traditions taqwa has been assigned three degrees. The first degree is that a man should follow the injunctions and keep aloof from prohibitions. The second degree is that recommended matters should also be followed and disliked things should be avoided. The third degree is that for fear of falling into doubts one may abstain from the permissible as well. The first degree is for the common men, the second for the nobles and the third for high dignitaries. Allah has referred to these three degrees in the following verse: On those who believe and do good, is no blame for what they ate, (before) when they did guard themselves and did believe, and did good, still (furthermore) they guard themselves and do good; and Allah loveth the doers of good. (Qur'an, 5:93)

Amir al-mu'minin says that only action based on piety is lasting, and only that action will blossom and bear fruit which is watered by piety because worship is only that wherein the feeling of submission exists. Thus, Allah says: Is he therefore better who hath laid his foundation on fear of Allah and (His) goodwill or he who layeth his foundation on the brink of a crumbling hollowed bank so it crumbled down with him into the fire of Hell... (Qur'an, 9:109) Consequently, every such belief as is not based on knowledge and conviction is like the edifice, erected without foundation, wherein there is no stability or firmness while every action that is without piety is like the plantation which withers for lack of watering.

Sermon 17: Among all the people the most detested before Allah are two persons...

About those who sit for dispensation of justice among people but are not fit for it.

ومن كلام له (عليه السلام)

في صفة من يتصدّى للحكم بين الاْمة وليس لذلك بأَهل

Among1 all the people the most detested before Allah are two persons. One is he who is devoted to his self. So he is deviated from the true path and loves speaking about (foul) innovations and inviting towards wrong path. He is therefore a nuisance for those who are enamoured of him, is himself misled from the guidance of those preceding him, misleads those who follow him in his life or after his death, carries the weight of others’ sins and is entangled in his own misdeeds.

انَّ أَبْغَضَ الخَلائِقِ إِلَى اللهِ تعالى رَجُلانِ: رَجُلٌ وَكَلَهُ اللهُ إِلَى نَفْسِهِ فَهُوَ جَائِرٌ عَنْ قَصْدِ السَّبِيلِ مَشْغُوفٌ بِكَلاَمِ بِدْعَةٍ وَدُعَاءِ ضَلاَلَةٍ، فَهُوَ فِتْنَةٌ لَمِنِ افْتَتَنَ بِهِ، ضَالٌّ عَنْ هَدْي مَنْ كَانَ قَبْلَهُ، مُضِلُّ لِمَنِ اقْتَدَى بِهِ في حَيَاتِهِ وَبَعْدَ وَفَاتِهِ، حَمَّالٌ خَطَايَا غَيْرِهِ، رَهْنٌ بِخَطِيئَتِهِ

The other man is he who has picked up ignorance. He moves among the ignorant, is senseless in the thick of mischief and is blind to the advantages of peace. Those resembling like men have named him scholar but he is not so. He goes out early morning to collect things whose deficiency is better than plenty, till when he has quenched his thirst from polluted water and acquired meaningless things, he sits among the people as a judge responsible for solving whatever is confusing to the others.

If an ambiguous problem is presented before him he manages shabby argument about it of his own accord and passes judgement on its basis. In this way he is entangled in the confusion of doubts as in the spider’s web, not knowing whether he was right or wrong. If he is right he fears lest he erred, while if he is wrong he hopes he is right. He is ignorant, wandering astray in ignorance and riding on carriages aimlessly moving in darkness. He did not try to find reality of knowledge. He scatters the traditions as the wind scatters the dry leaves.

وَرَجُلٌ قَمَشَ جَهْلاً مُوضِعٌ في جُهَّالِ الاْمَّةِ غادرٍ في أَغْبَاشِ الفِتْنَةِ، عِمٍبِمَا في عَقْدِ الهُدْنَةِ قَدْ سَمَّاهُ أَشْبَاهُ النَّاسِ عَالمِاً وَلَيْسَ بِهِ، بَكَّرَ فَاسْتَكْثَرَ مِنْ جَمْعٍ، مَا قَلَّ مِنْهُ خَيْرٌ مِمَّا كَثُرَ، حَتَّى إِذَا ارْتَوَى مِنْ مَاءٍ آجِنٍك، وَأكْثَر مِن غَيْرِ طَائِلٍ جَلَسَ بَيْنَ النَّاسِ قَاضِياً ضَامِناً لِتَخْلِيصِ مَا التَبَسَ عَلَى غيْرِهِ. فَإِنْ نَزَلَتْ بِهِ إِحْدَى المُبْهَمَاتِ هَيَّأَ لَهَا حَشْواً رَثّاً مِنْ رَأْيِهِ، ثُمَّ قَطَعَ بِهِ، فَهُوَ مِنْ لَبْسِ الشُّبُهَاتِ في مِثْلِ نَسْجِ العَنْكَبُوتِ: لاَ يَدْرِي أَصَابَ أَمْ أَخْطَأَ. إنْ أَصَابَ خَافَ أَنْ يَكُونَ قَدْ أَخْطَأَ، وَإِنْ أَخْطَأَ رَجَا أَنْ يَكُونَ قَدْ أَصَابَ. جَاهِلٌ خَبَّاطُجَهلات، عَاشٍرَكَّابُ عَشَوَات لَمْ يَعَضَّ عَلَى العِلْمِ بِضِرْسٍ قَاطِعٍ، يُذرِي الرِّوَايَاتِ إذْراءَ الرِّيحِ الهَشِيمَ

By Allah, he is not capable of solving the problems that come to him nor is fit for the position assigned to him. Whatever he does not know he does not regard it worth knowing. He does not realise that what is beyond his reach is within the reach of others. If anything is not clear to him he keeps quiet over it because he knows his own ignorance. Lost lives are crying against his unjust verdicts, and properties (that have been wrongly disposed of) are grumbling against him.

لاَ مَلِيٌ وَاللهِ ـ بِإِصْدَارِ مَا وَرَدَ عَلَيْهِ، وَلاَ هُوَ أَهْلٌ لِما فُوّضَ إليه، لاَ يَحْسَبُ العِلْمَ في شيْءٍ مِمَّا أَنْكَرَهُ، وَلاَ يَرَى أَنَّ مِنْ وَرَاءِ مَا بَلَغَ منه مَذْهَباً لِغَيْرهِ، وَإِنْ أَظْلَمَ عَلَيْهِ أَمْرٌ اكْتَتَمَ بِهِلِمَا يَعْلَمُ مِنْ جَهْلِ نَفْسِهِ، تَصْرُخُ مِنْ جَوْرِ قَضَائِهِ الدِّمَاءُ، وَتَعَجُّ مِنْهُ المَوَارِيثُ

I complain to Allah about persons who live ignorant and die misguided. For them nothing is more worthless than the Qur’an if it is recited as it should be recited, nor anything more valuable than the Qur’an if its verses are removed from their places, nor anything more vicious than virtue nor more virtuous than vice.

إِلَى اللهِ أَشْكُو مِنْ مَعْشَرٍ يَعِيشُونَ جُهَّالاً، وَيَمُوتُونَ ضُلاَّلاً، لَيْسَ فِيهمْ سِلْعَةٌ أَبْوَرُمِنَ الكِتَابِ إِذَا تُلِيَ حَقَّ تِلاَوَتِهِ، وَلاَ سِلْعَةٌ أَنْفَقُبَيْعاً وَلاَ أَغْلَى ثَمَناً مِنَ الكِتَابِ إِذَا حُرِّفَ عَنْ مَوَاضِعِهِ، وَلاَ عِنْدَهُمْ أَنْكَرُ مِنَ المَعْرُوفِ، وَلاَ أَعْرَفُ مِنَ المُنكَرِ

Alternative Sources for Sermon 17

(1) al-Kulayni, Usul al-Kafi, I, 55;

(2) Abu Talib al-Makki, Qut, I,290 ;

(3) al-Harawi, al-Jam`, see(4)

(4) Ibn al-'Athir, al-Nihayah (under kh-b-t);

(5) al-Qadi al-Nu`man, Usul al-madhahib,135 ;

(6) al-Tusi, al-'Amali, I,240 ;

(7) al-Tabarsi, al-'Ihtijaj, I,390 ;

(8) al-Mufid, al-'Irshad,109 ;

(9) Ibn Qutaybah, `Uyun, I, 61;

(10) Ibn Qutaybah, Gharib al-hadith, see Ibn Abi al-Hadid, Sharh, I, 90.

Notes

1. Amir al-mu'minin has held two categories of persons as the most detestable by Allah and the worst among people. Firstly, those who are misguided even in basic tenets and are busy in the spreading of evil. Secondly, those who abandon the Qur'an and sunnah and pronounce injunctions through their imagination. They create a circle of their devotees and popularise the religious code of law concocted by themselves. The misguidance and wrongfulness of such persons does not remain confined to their own selves but the seed of misguidance sown by them bears fruit and growing into the form of a big tree provides asylum to the misguided and this misguidance goes on multiplying. And since these very people are the real originators the weight of other's sins is also on their shoulders as the Qur'an says:

And certainly they shall bear their own burdens, and (other) burdens with their own burdens... (29:13)

Sermon 13: You are a woman's army

Condemning the people of Basrah [after the battle of Jamal]

1

ومن كلام له (عليه السلام)

في ذم البصرة وأهلها [بعد وقعة الجمل [

You were the army of a woman and in the command of a quadruped. When it grumbled you responded, and when it was wounded (hamstrung) you fled away. Your character is low and your pledge is broken. Your faith is hypocrisy. Your water is brackish. He who stays with you is laden with sins and he who forsakes you secures Allah’s mercy. It is as though I see your mosque prominent, resembling the surface of a boat, while Allah has sent chastisement from above and from below it and everyone who is on it is drowned.2

كُنْتُمْ جُنْدَ الْمَرْأَةِ، وَأَتْبَاعَ البَهِيمَةِ رَغَافَأَجَبْتُم، وَعُقِرَفَهَرَبْتُمْ. أَخْلاَقُكُمْ دِقَاقٌ وَعَهْدُكُمْ شِقَاقٌ، وَدِيْنُكُمْ نِفَاقٌ، وَمَاؤُكُمْ زُعَاقٌ المُقِيمُ بَيْنَ أَظْهُرِكُمْ مُرْتَهَنٌ بِذَنْبِهِ، وَالشَّاخِصُ عَنْكُمْ مُتَدَارَكٌ بِرَحْمةٍ مِنْ رَبِّهِ. كَأَنِّي بِمَسْجِدكُمْ كَجُؤْجُؤِ سَفِينَةٍ قَدْ بَعَثَ اللهُ عَلَيْها العَذَابَ مِنْ فَوْقِها وَمِنْ تَحتِها، وَغَرِقَ مَنْ في ضِمْنِها

Another version

By Allah, your city would certainly be drowned so much so that as though I see its mosque like the upper part of a boat or a sitting ostrich.

وفي رواية :

وَأيْمُ اللهِ لَتَغْرَقَنَّ بَلْدَتُكُمْ حَتَّى كَأَنِّي أَنْظُرُ إِلى مَسْجِدِهَا كَجُؤْجُؤِ سَفِينَةٍ، أَوْ نَعَامَةٍ جَاثِمَةٍ

Another version

Like the bosom of a bird in deep sea.

وفي رواية أخرى :

كَجُؤْجُؤِ طَيْرٍ في لُجَّةِ بَحْرٍ

Another version

Your city is the most stinking of all the cities as regards its clay, the nearest to water and remotest from the sky. It contains nine tenths of evil. He who enters it is surrounded with his sins and he who is out of it enjoys Allah’s forgiveness. It seems as though I look at this habitation of yours that water has so engulfed it that nothing can be seen of it except the highest part of mosque appearing like the bosom of a bird in deep sea.

و في رواية :

بلادكم أنتن بلاد الله تربةً: أقربها من الماء و أبعدها من السماء و بها تسعة اعشار الشر، المحتَبَس فيها بِذنبِهِ، و الخارج بِعفوِ اللهِ كأنّي أنظر الى قريتكم هذه قد طبَّقَها الماء، حتّى ما يرى منها الّا شُرُف المسجد، كأنه جؤجؤ طير في لجة بحر

Alternative Sources for Sermon 13

(1) Al-Dinawari, al-'Akhbar,153 ;

(2) al-Mas`udi, Muruj, II,377 ;

(3) Ibn Qutaybah, `Uyun, I,217 ;

(4) Ibn `Abd Rabbih, al-`Iqd, IV,328 ;

(5) al-Majlisi, Bihar, VIII,447 ;

(6) `Ali ibn Ibrahim, Tafsir,655 ;

(7) al-Tusi, al-'Amali,* 78;

(8) al-Mufid, al-Jamal,210 ,203 .

Notes

1. Ibn Maytham writes that when the Battle of Jamal ended then on the third day after it Amir al-mu'minin said the morning prayer in the central mosque of Basrah and after finishing it stood on the right side of the prayer place reclining against the wall and delivered this sermon wherein he described the lowness of character of the people of Basrah and their slyness, namely that they got enflamed at others' instigation without anything of their own and making over their command to a woman clung to a camel. They broke away after swearing allegiance and exhibited their low character and evil nature by practising double facedness. In this sermon woman implies `A'ishah and quadruped implies the camel (Jamal) after which this battle has been named the Battle of Jamal.'

This battle originated in this way that when although during the life time of `Uthman, `A'ishah used to oppose him and had left for Mecca leaving him in siege and as such she had a share in his assassination details of which would be stated at some suitable place but when on her return from Mecca towards Medina she heard from `Abdullah ibn Salamah that after `Uthman allegiance had been paid to `Ali (as Caliph) she suddenly exclaimed, "If allegiance has been paid to `Ali, I wish the sky had burst on the earth. Let me go back to Mecca." Consequently she decided to return to Mecca and began saying, "By Allah `Uthman has been killed helplessly. I shall certainly avenge his blood."

On seeing this wide change in the state of affairs Abu Salamah said, "What are you saying as you yourself used to say "Kill this Na`thal ; he had turned unbeliever." Thereupon she replied, "Not only I but everyone used to say so; but leave these things and listen to what I am now saying, that is better and deserves more attention. It is so strange that first he was called upon to repent but before giving him an opportunity to do so he has been killed." On this Abu Salamah recited the following verses addressing her:

You started it and now you are changing and raising storms of wind and rain.

You ordered for his killing and told us that he had turned unbeliever.

We admit that he has been killed but under your orders and the real Killer is one who ordered it.

Nevertheless, neither the sky fell over us nor did the sun and moon fall into eclipse.

Certainly people have paid allegiance to one who can ward off the enemy with power and grandeur, does not allow swords to come near him and loosens the twist of the rope, that is, subdues the enemy.

He is always fully armed for combat and the faithful is never like the traitor.

However, when she reached Mecca with a passion for vengeance she began rousing the people to avenge `Uthman's blood by circulating stories of his having been victimised. The first to respond to this call was `Abdullah ibn `Amir al-Hadrami who had been the governor of Mecca in `Uthman's reign and with him Marwan ibn al-Hakam, Sa`id ibn al-`As and other Umayyads rose to support her. On the other side Talhah ibn `Ubaydillah and az-Zubayr ibn al-`Awwam also reached Mecca from Medina. From Yemen Ya`la ibn Munabbih who had been governor there during `Uthman's caliphate and the former governor of Basrah, `Abdullah ibn `Amir ibn Kurayz also reached there, and joining together began preparing their plans.

Battle had been decided upon but discussion was about the venue of confrontation. `A'ishah's opinion was to make Medina the venue of the battle but some people opposed and held that it was difficult to deal with Medinites, and that some other place should be chosen as the venue. At last after much discussion it was decided to march towards Basrah as there was no dearth of men to support the cause. Consequently on the strength of `Abdullah ibn `Amir's countless wealth, and the offer of six hundred thousand Dirhams and six hundred camels by Ya`la ibn Munabbih they prepared an army of three thousand and set off to Basrah. There was a small incident on the way on account of which `A'ishah refused to advance further.

What happened was that at a place she heard the barking of dogs and enquired from the camel driver the name of the place. He said it was Haw'ab. On hearing this name she recalled the Prophet's admonition when he had said to his wives, "I wish I could know at which of you the dogs of Haw'ab would bark." So when she realised that she herself was that one she got the camel seated by patting and expressed her intention to abandon the march. But the device of her companions saved the deteriorating situation. `Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr swore to assure her that it was not Haw'ab, Talhah seconded him and for her further assurance also sent for fifty persons to stand witness to it. When all the people were on one side what could a single woman do by opposing. Eventually they were successful and `A'ishah resumed her forward march with the same enthusiasm.

When this army reached Basrah, people were first amazed to see the riding animal of `A'ishah. Jariyah ibn Qudamah came forward and said, "O' mother of the faithful, the assassination of `Uthman was one tragedy but the greater tragedy is that you have come out on this cursed camel and ruined your honour and esteem. It is better that you should get back." But since neither the incident at Haw'ab could deter her nor could the Qur'anic injunction: "Keep sitting in your houses" (33:33) stop her, what effect could these voices produce. Consequently, she disregarded all this.

When this army tried to enter the city the Governor of Basrah `Uthman ibn Hunayf came forward to stop them and when the two parties came face to face they drew their swords out of the sheaths and pounced upon each other. When a good number had been killed from either side `A'ishah intervened on the basis of her influence and the two groups agreed that till the arrival of Amir al-mu'minin the existing administration should continue and `Uthman ibn Hunayf should continue on his post. But only two days had elapsed when they made a nightly attack on `Uthman ibn Hunayf, killed forty innocent persons, beat `Uthman ibn Hunayf, plucked every hair of his beard, took him in their custody and shut him up. Then they attacked public treasury and while ransacking it killed twenty persons on the spot, and beheaded fifty more after arresting them.

Then they attacked the grain store, whereupon an elderly noble of Basrah Hukaym ibn Jabalah could not control himself and reaching there with his men said to `Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr, "Spare some of this grain for the city's populace. After all there should be a limit to oppression. You have spread killing and destruction all round and put `Uthman ibn Hunayf in confinement. For Allah's sake keep off these ruining activities and release `Uthman ibn Hunayf. Is there no fear of Allah in your hearts?" Ibn az-Zubayr said, "This is vengeance of `Uthman's life." Hukaym ibn Jabalah retorted, "Were those who have been killed assassins of `Uthman? By Allah, if I had supporters and comrades I should have certainly avenged the blood of these Muslims whom you have killed without reason." Ibn az-Zubayr replied, "We shall not give anything out of this grain, nor will `Uthman ibn Hunayf be released." At last the battle raged between these two parties but how could a few individuals deal with such a big force? The result was that Hukaym ibn Jabalah, his son al-Ashraf ibn Hukaym ibn Jabalah, his brother ar-Ri'l ibn Jabalah and seventy persons of his tribe were killed. In short, killing and looting prevailed all round. Neither anyone's life was secure nor was there any way to save one's honour or property.

When Amir al-mu'minin was informed of the march to Basrah he set out to stop it with a force which consisted of seventy of those who had taken part in the battle of Badr and four hundred out of those companions who had the honour of being present at the Allegiance of Ridwan (Divine Pleasure). When he stopped at the stage of Dhiqar he sent his son Hasan (p.b.u.h.) and `Ammar ibn Yasir to Kufah to invite its people to fighting. Consequently, despite interference of Abu Musa al-Ash`ari seven thousand combatants from there joined Amir al- mu'minin's army. He left that place after placing the army under various commanders.

Eye witnesses state that when this force reached near Basrah first of all a contingent of ansar appeared foremost. Its standard was held by Abu Ayyub al-Ansari. After it appeared another contingent of 1000 whose commander was Khuzaymah ibn Thabit al-Ansari. Then another contingent came in sight. Its standard was borne by Abu Qatadah ibn ar-Rabi`. Then a crowd of a thousand old and young persons was seen. They had signs of prostration on their foreheads and veil of fear of Allah on their face. It seemed as if they were standing before the Divine Glory on the Day of Judgement. Their Commander rode a dark horse, was dressed in white, had black turban on his head and was reciting the Qur'an loudly. This was `Ammar ibn Yasir. Then another contingent appeared. Its standard was in the hand of Qays ibn Sa`d ibn `Ubadah.

Then an army came to sight. Its leader wore white dress and had a black turban on his head. He was so handsome that all eyes centred around him. This was `Abdullah ibn `Abbas. Then followed a contingent of the companions of the Prophet. Their standard bearer was Qutham ibn al-`Abbas. Then after the passing of a few contingents a big crowd was seen, wherein there was such a large number of spears that they were overlapping and flags of numerous colours were flying. Among them a big and lofty standard was seen with distinctive position. Behind it was seen a rider guarded by sublimity and greatness. His sinews were well-developed and eyes were cast downwards. His awe and dignity was such that no one could look at him. This was the Ever Victorious Lion of Allah namely `Ali ibn Abi Talib (p.b.u.h.).

On his right and left were Hasan and Husayn (p.b.u.t.). In front of him Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah walked in slow steps carrying the banner of victory and glory, and on the back were the young men of Banu Hashim, the people of Badr and `Abdullah ibn Ja`far ibn Abi Talib. When this army reached the place az-Zawiyah, Amir al-mu'minin alighted from the horse, and after performing four rak`ah of prayer put his cheeks on the ground. When he lifted his head the ground was drenched with tears and the tongue was uttering these words: O' Sustainer of earth, heaven and the high firmament, this is Basrah. Fill our lap with its good and protect us from its evils.

Then proceeding forward he got down in the battle-field of Jamal where the enemy was already camping. First of all Amir al-mu'minin announced in his army that no one should attack another, nor take the initiative. Saying this he came in front of the opposite army and said to Talhah and az-Zubayr, "You ask `A'ishah by swearing in the name of Allah and His prophet whether I am not free from the blame of `Uthman's blood, and whether I used the same words for him which you used to say, and whether I pressurised you for allegiance or you swore it of your own free will." Talhah got exasperated at these words but az-Zubayr relented, and Amir al-mu'minin turned back after it, and giving the Qur'an to Muslim (a young man from the tribe of `Abd Qays) sent him towards them to pronounce to them the verdict of the Qur'an. But people took both of them within aim and covered this godly man with their arrows.

Then `Ammar ibn Yasir went to canvass and convince them and caution them with the consequences of war but his words were also replied by arrows. Till now Amir al-mu'minin had not allowed an attack as a result of which the enemy continued feeling encouraged and went on raining arrows constantly. At last with the dying of a few valiant combatants consternation was created among Amir al-mu'minin's ranks and some people came with a few bodies before him and said, "O' Commander of the faithful you are not allowing us to fight while they are covering us with arrows. How long can we let them make our bosoms the victim of their arrows, and remain handfolded at their excesses?"

At this Amir al-mu'minin did show anger but acting with restraint and endurance, came to the enemy in that very form without wearing armour or any arm and shouted, "Where is az-Zubayr?" At first az-Zubayr hesitated to come forward but he noticed that Amir al-mu'minin had no arms he came out. Amir al-mu'minin said to him "O' az-Zubayr, you must remember that one day the Prophet told you that you would fight with me and wrong and excess would be on your side." az-Zubayr replied that he had said so. Then Amir al-mu'minin enquired "Why have you come then?" He replied that his memory had missed it and if he had recollected it earlier he would not have come that way. Amir al-mu'minin said, "Well, now you have recollected it" and he replied, "Yes." Saying this he went straight to `A'ishah and told her that he was getting back.

She asked him the reason and he replied, "`Ali has reminded me a forgotten matter. I had gone astray, but now I have come on the right path and would not fight `Ali ibn Abi Talib at any cost." `A'ishah said, "You have caught fear of the swords of the sons of `Abd al-Muttalib." He said, "No" and saying this he turned the reins of his horse. However, it is gratifying that some consideration was accorded to the Prophet's saying, for at Haw'ab even after recollection of the Prophet's words no more than transient effect was taken of it. On returning after this conversation Amir al-mu'minin observed that they had attacked the right and left flanks of his army. Noticing this Amir al-mu'minin said, "Now the plea has been exhausted. Call my son Muhammad." When he came Amir al-mu'minin said, "My son, attack them now."

Muhammad bowed his head and taking the standard proceeded to the battle-field. But arrows were falling in such exuberance that he had to stop. When Amir al-mu'minin saw this he called out at him, "Muhammad, why don't you advance?" He said, "Father, in this shower of arrows there is no way to proceed. Wait till the violence of arrows subsides." He said, "No, thrust yourself in the arrows and spears and attack." Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah advanced a little but the archers so surrounded him that he had to hold his steps. On seeing this a frown appeared on Amir al-mu'minin's fore-head and getting forward he hit the sword's handle on the Muhammad's back and said, "This is the effect of your mother's veins."

Saying this he took the standard from his hands and folding up his sleeves made such and attack that a tumult was created in the enemy's ranks from one end to the other. To whichever row he turned, it became clear and to whatever side he directed himself bodies were seen falling and heads rolling in the hoofs of horses. When after convulsing the rows he returned to his position he said to Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah, "Look, my son, battle is fought like this." Saying this he gave the standard to him and ordered him to proceed. Muhammad advanced towards the enemy with a contingent of ansar. The enemy also came out moving and balancing their spears. But the brave son of the valiant father convulsed rows over rows while the other warriors also made the battle-field glory and left heaps of dead bodies.

From the other side also there was full demonstration of spirit of sacrifice. Dead bodies were falling one over the other but they continued sacrificing their lives devotedly around the camel. Particularly the condition of Banu Dabbah was that although their hands were being severed from the elbows for holding the reins of the camel, and bosoms were being pierced yet they had the following battle-song on their tongues: a) To us death is sweeter than honey. We are Banu Dabbah, camel rearers. b) We are sons of death when death comes. We announce the death of `Uthman with the edges of spears. c) Give us back our chief and there is an end to it.

The low character and ignorance from faith of these Banu Dabbah, can be well understood by that one incident which al-Mada'ini has narrated. He writes that in Basrah there was a man with mutilated ear. He asked him its reason when he said, "I was watching the sight of dead bodies in the battle-field of Jamal when I saw a wounded man who sometimes raised his head and sometimes dashed it back on the ground. I approached near. Then the following two verses were on his lips: a) Our mother pushed us into the deep waters of death and did not get back till we had thoroughly drunk. b) By misfortune we obeyed Banu Taym who are none but slave men and slave girls.

"I told him it was not the time to recite verses; he should rather recall Allah and recite the kalimat ash-shahadah (verse of testimony). On my saying this he saw me with angry looks and uttering a severe abuse and said, "You are asking me to recite kalimat ash-shahadah, get frightened at the last moment and show impatience." I was astonished to hear this and decided to return without saying anything further. When he saw me returning he said, "Wait; for your sake I am prepared to recite, but teach me." I drew close to teach him the kalimah when he asked me to get closer. When I got closer he caught my ear with his teeth and did not leave it till he tore it from the root. I did not think it proper to molest a dying man and was about to get back abusing and cursing him when he asked me to listen one more thing. I agreed to listen lest he had an unsatisfied wish. He said that when I should get to my mother and she enquired who had bitten my ear I should say that it was done by `Umayr ibn al-Ahlab ad-Dabbi who had been deceived by a woman aspiring to become the commander of the faithful (head of the state)."

However, when the dazzling lightning of swords finished the lives of thousands of persons and hundreds of Banu Azd and Banu Dabbah were killed for holding the rein of the camel, Amir al-mu'minin ordered, "Kill the camel for it is Satan." Saying this he made such a severe attack that the cries of "Peace" and "Protection" rose from all round. When he reached near the camel he ordered Bujayr ibn Duljah to kill the camel at once. Consequently, Bujayr hit him with such full might that the camel fell in agony on the side of its bosom. No sooner than the camel fell the opposite army took to heels and the carrier holding `A'ishah was left lonely and unguarded. The companion of Amir al-mu'minin took control of the carrier and under orders of Amir al-mu'minin, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr escorted `A'ishah to the house of Safiyyah bint al-Harith.

This encounter commenced on the 10th of Jumada ath-thaniyah, 36 A.H., in the afternoon and came to an end the same evening. In it from Amir al-mu'minin's army of twenty two thousand, one thousand and seventy or according to another version five hundred persons were killed as martyrs while from `A'ishah's army of thirty thousand, seventeen thousand persons were killed, and the Prophet's saying, "That people who assigned their affairs (of state) to a woman would never prosper" was fully corroborated. (al-Imamah wa's-siyasah; Muruj adh-dhahab; al-`Iqd al-farid; at-Tarikh, at Tabari)

2. Ibn Abi'l-Hadid has written that as prophesied by Amir al-mu'minin, Basrah was flooded twice - once in the days of al-Qadir Bi’llah and once in the reign of al-Qa'im bi Amri'l-lah and the state of flooding was just this that while the whole city was under water but the top ends of the mosque were seen about the surface of the water and looked like a bird sitting on the side of its bosom.

Sermon 14: Your land is close to the sea

This also is in condemnation of the people of Basrah

ومن كلام له (عليه السلام)

في مثل ذلك

Your land is close to the sea and away from the sky. Your wits have become light and your minds are full of folly. You are the aim of the archer, a morsel for the eater and an easy prey for the hunter.

أرْضُكُمْ قَرِيبَةٌ مِنَ المَاءِ، بَعِيدَةٌ مِنَ السَّماءِ، خَفَّتْ عُقُولُكُمْ، وَسَفِهَتْ حُلُومُكُمْ، فَأَنْتُمْ غَرَضٌ لِنَابِل، وَأُكْلَةٌ لاِكِل، وَفَرِيسَةٌ لِصائِد

Alternative Sources for Sermon 14

(1) Al-Mufid, al-Jamal,217 ;

(2) al-Waqidi, al-Jamal, see al-Mufid, op. cit.;

(3) al-Dinawari, al-'Akhbar,151 ;

(4) Ibn Qutaybah, `Uyun, I,217 ;

(5) al-Mas`udi, Muruj, II,368 ;

(6) Ibn `Abd Rabbih, al-`Iqd, II,169 .

Sermon 15: By God, even if I had found that

After returning to the Muslims the land grants made by `Uthman ibn `Affan, he said:

ومن كلام له (عليه السلام)

فيما ردّه على المسلمين من قطائع عثمان

By Allah, even if I had found that by such money women have been married or slave-maids have been purchased I would have returned it (to its owners) because there is wide scope in dispensation of justice, and he who finds it hard to act justly will find it harder to deal with injustice.

وَاللهِ لَوْ وَجَدْتُهُ قَدْ تُزُوِّجَ بِهِ النِّسَاءُ، وَمُلِكَ بِهِ الاْمَاءُ، لَرَدَدْتُهُ; فَإِنَّ في العَدْلِ سَعَةً، وَمَنْ ضَاقَ عَلَيْهِ العَدْلُ، فَالجَوْرُ عَلَيْهِ أَضيَقُ !

Alternative Sources for Sermon 15

(1) Al-`Askari, al-'Awa'il,102 ;

(2) al-Qadi al-Nu`man, Da`a'im, I,396 ;

(3) al-Mas`udi, Ithbat,120 .

Sermon 16: My word is the guarantee of my promise

Delivered when allegiance was sworn to him at Medina

من كلام له (عليه السلام)

لمّا بويع بالمدينة

وفيها يخبر الناس بعلمه بما تؤول إليه أحوالهم وفيها يقسمهم إلى أقسام

The responsibility for what I say is guaranteed and I am answerable for it. He to whom experiences have clearly shown the past exemplary punishments (given by Allah to peoples) is prevented by piety from falling into doubts. You should know that the same troubles have returned to you which existed when the Prophet was first sent.

By Allah who sent the Prophet with faith and truth, you will be severely subverted, bitterly shaken as in sieving and fully mixed as by spooning in a cooking pot till your low persons become high and high ones become low, those who were behind would attain forward positions and those who were forward would become backward. By Allah, I have not concealed a single word or spoken any lie and I had been informed of this event and of this time.

ذِمَّتي بِمَا أَقُولُ رَهِينَةٌ وَأَنَا بِهِ زَعِيمٌ: إِنَّ مَنْ صَرَّحَتْ لَهُ العِبَرُ عَمَّا بَيْنَ يَدَيْهِ مِنَ المَثُلاتِ، حَجَزَهُ التَّقْوَى عَنْ تَقَحُّمِ الشُّبُهَاتِ. أَلاَ وَإِنَّ بَلِيَّتَكُمْ قَدْ عَادَتْ كَهَيْئَتِهَا يَوْمَ بَعَثَ اللهُ نَبِيَّهُ (صلى الله عليه وآله)، وَالَّذِي بَعَثَهُ بِالحَقِّ لَتُبَلْبَلُنَّ بَلْبَلَةً، وَلَتُغَرْبَلُنَّ غَرْبَلَةً، وَلَتُسَاطُنَّ سَوْطَ القِدْرِ، حَتَّى يَعُودَ أَسْفَلُكُمْ أَعْلاَكُمْ، وَأَعْلاَكُمْ أَسْفَلَكُمْ، وَلَيَسْبِقَنَّ سَابِقُونَ كَانُوا قَصَّرُوا، وَلَيُقَصِّرَنَّ سَبَّاقُونَ كَانُوا سَبَقُوا. وَاللهِ مَا كَتَمْتُ وَشْمَةً، وَلا كَذَبْتُ كِذْبَةً، وَلَقَدْ نُبِّئْتُ بِهذا المَقامِ وَهذَا اليَوْمِ

Beware that sins are like unruly horses on whom their riders have been placed and their reins have been let loose so that they would jump with them in Hell. Beware that piety is like trained horses on whom the riders have been placed with the reins in their hands, so that they would take the riders to Heaven. There is right and wrong and there are followers for each. If wrong dominates, it has (always) in the past been so, and if truth goes down that too has often occurred. It seldom happens that a thing that lags behind comes forward.

أَلاَ وَإِنَّ الخَطَايَا خَيْلٌ شُمُسٌ حُمِلَ عَلَيْهَا أَهْلُها، وَخُلِعَتْ لُجُمُهَا، فَتَقَحَّمَتْ بِهِمْ في النَّارِ

أَلاَ وَإِنَّ التَّقْوَى مَطَايَا ذُلُلٌ(2)، حُمِلَ عَلَيْهَا أَهْلُهَا، وَأُعْطُوا أَزِمَّتَها، فَأَوْرَدَتْهُمُ الجَنَّةَ

حَقٌّ وَبَاطِلٌ، وَلِكُلٍّ أَهْلٌ، فَلَئِنْ أَمِرَ البَاطِلُ لَقَدِيماً فَعَلَ، وَلَئِنْ قَلَّ الحقُّ لَرُبَّما وَلَعَلَّ، وَلَقَلَّمَا أَدْبَرَ شَيءٌ فَأَقْبَلَ !

ash-Sharif ar-Radi says: In this small speech there is more beauty than can be appreciated, and the quantity of amazement aroused by it is more than the appreciation accorded to it. Despite what we have stated it has so many aspects of eloquence that cannot be expressed nor can anyone reach its depth, and no one can understand what I am saying unless one has attained this art and known its details.

No one appreciates it except those who know (Qur’an, 29:43)

قال السيد الشريف: وأقول: إنّ في هذا الكلام الادنى من مواقع الاحسان ملا تبلغه مواقع الاستحسان، وإنّ حظ العجب منه أكثر من حظ العُجب به، وفيه ـ مع الحال التي وصفنا ـ زوائد من الفصاحة لا يقوم بها لسان، ولا يَطَّلع فَجها إنسان، ولا يعرف ما أقوله إلاّ من ضرب في هذه الصناعة بحق، وجرى فيها على عرق، (وَمَا يَعْقِلُهَا إلاّ العَالمِونَ).

From the same Sermon

ومن هذه الخطبة

[وفيها يقسّم الناس إلى ثلاثة أصناف [

He who has heaven and hell in his view has no other aim. He who attempts and acts quickly, succeeds, while the seeker who is slow may also entertain hope, and he who falls short of action faces destruction in Hell. On right and left there are misleading paths. Only the middle way is the (right) path which is the Everlasting Book and the traditions of the Prophet. From it the sunnah has spread out and towards it is the eventual return.

شُغِلَ مَنِ الجَنَّةُ وَالنَّارُ أَمَامَهُ! سَاع سَرِيعٌ نَجَا، وَطَالِبٌ بَطِيءٌ رَجَا، وَمُقَصِّرٌ في النَّارِ هَوَى. الَيمِينُ وَالشِّمالُ مَضَلَّةٌ، وَالطَّرِيقُ الوُسْطَى هِيَ الجَادَّةُ’ عَلَيْهَا بَاقي الكِتَابِ وَآثَارُ النُّبُوَّةِ، وَمِنْهَا مَنْفَذُ السُّنَّةِ، وَإلَيْهَا مَصِيرُ العَاقِبَةِ

He who claims (otherwise) is ruined and he who concocts falsehood is disappointed. He who opposes1 right with his face gets destruction. It is enough ignorance for a man not to know himself. He who is strong rooted2 in piety does not get destruction, and the plantation of a people based on piety never remains without water. Hide yourselves in your houses and reform yourselves. Repentance is at your back. One should praise only Allah and condemn only his own self.

هَلَكَ مَنِ ادَّعى، وَخَابَ مَنِ افْتَرَى، مَنْ أَبْدَى صَفْحَتَهُ لِلْحَقِّ هَلَكَ، وَكَفَى بِالْمَرْءِ جَهْلاً أَلاَّ يَعْرِفَ قَدْرَهُ، لاَيَهْلِكُ عَلَى التَّقْوَى سِنْخ أَصْل، وَلاَ يَظْمَأُ عَلَيْهَا زَرْعُ قَوْم

فَاسْتَتِرُوا بِبُيُوتِكُمْ، وَأَصْلِحُوا ذَاتَ بَيْنِكُمْ، وَالتَّوْبَةُ مِنْ وَرَائِكُمْ، وَلاَ يَحْمَدْ حَامِدٌ إِلاَّ رَبَّهُ، وَلاَ يَلُمْ لاَئِمٌ إِلاَّ نَفْسَهُ

Alternative Sources for Sermon 16

(1) Al-Jahiz, al-Bayan, I,170 ;

(2) Ibn al-'Athir, al-Nihayah, I,132 ;

(3) al-Mufid, al-'Irshad,139 ;

(4) Ibn Qutaybah, `Uyun, II,236 ;

(5) Ibn `Abd Rabbih, al-`Iqd, II,162 ;

(6) al-`Askari, al-'Awa'il,102 ;

(7) al-Kulayni, Usul al-Kafi, I,369 and Rawdat al-Kafi, 67;

(8) al-Tusi, al'Amali, *147 .

Notes

1. In some versions after the words "man abda safhatahu lilhaqqi halaka:" the words "`inda jahalati'n-nas" also occur. In that case the meaning of this sentence would be that he who stands in face of right dies in the estimation of the ignorant.

2. Piety is the name of heart and mind being affected and impressed by the Divine Greatness and Glory, as an effect of which the spirit of man becomes full of fear of Allah, and its inevitable result is that engrossment in worship and prayer increases. It is impossible that heart may be full of Divine fear and there be no manifestation of it in actions and deeds. And since worship and submission reform the heart and nurture the spirit, purity of heart increases with the increase of worship. That is why in the Qur'an "taqwa" (piety) has been applied sometimes to fear, sometimes to worship and devotion and sometimes to purity of heart and spirit. Thus in the verse "wa iyyaya fattaqun" (and Me you fear [16:2]) taqwa implies fear, in the verse, "ittaqu'l-laha haqqa tuqatihi" (worship Allah as He ought to be worshipped [3:102]), taqwa implies worship and devotion and in the verse "wa yakhsha'l-laha wa yattaqhi faulaika humu'l-faizun" (24:52) taqwa implies purity of spirit and cleanliness of heart.

In the traditions taqwa has been assigned three degrees. The first degree is that a man should follow the injunctions and keep aloof from prohibitions. The second degree is that recommended matters should also be followed and disliked things should be avoided. The third degree is that for fear of falling into doubts one may abstain from the permissible as well. The first degree is for the common men, the second for the nobles and the third for high dignitaries. Allah has referred to these three degrees in the following verse: On those who believe and do good, is no blame for what they ate, (before) when they did guard themselves and did believe, and did good, still (furthermore) they guard themselves and do good; and Allah loveth the doers of good. (Qur'an, 5:93)

Amir al-mu'minin says that only action based on piety is lasting, and only that action will blossom and bear fruit which is watered by piety because worship is only that wherein the feeling of submission exists. Thus, Allah says: Is he therefore better who hath laid his foundation on fear of Allah and (His) goodwill or he who layeth his foundation on the brink of a crumbling hollowed bank so it crumbled down with him into the fire of Hell... (Qur'an, 9:109) Consequently, every such belief as is not based on knowledge and conviction is like the edifice, erected without foundation, wherein there is no stability or firmness while every action that is without piety is like the plantation which withers for lack of watering.

Sermon 17: Among all the people the most detested before Allah are two persons...

About those who sit for dispensation of justice among people but are not fit for it.

ومن كلام له (عليه السلام)

في صفة من يتصدّى للحكم بين الاْمة وليس لذلك بأَهل

Among1 all the people the most detested before Allah are two persons. One is he who is devoted to his self. So he is deviated from the true path and loves speaking about (foul) innovations and inviting towards wrong path. He is therefore a nuisance for those who are enamoured of him, is himself misled from the guidance of those preceding him, misleads those who follow him in his life or after his death, carries the weight of others’ sins and is entangled in his own misdeeds.

انَّ أَبْغَضَ الخَلائِقِ إِلَى اللهِ تعالى رَجُلانِ: رَجُلٌ وَكَلَهُ اللهُ إِلَى نَفْسِهِ فَهُوَ جَائِرٌ عَنْ قَصْدِ السَّبِيلِ مَشْغُوفٌ بِكَلاَمِ بِدْعَةٍ وَدُعَاءِ ضَلاَلَةٍ، فَهُوَ فِتْنَةٌ لَمِنِ افْتَتَنَ بِهِ، ضَالٌّ عَنْ هَدْي مَنْ كَانَ قَبْلَهُ، مُضِلُّ لِمَنِ اقْتَدَى بِهِ في حَيَاتِهِ وَبَعْدَ وَفَاتِهِ، حَمَّالٌ خَطَايَا غَيْرِهِ، رَهْنٌ بِخَطِيئَتِهِ

The other man is he who has picked up ignorance. He moves among the ignorant, is senseless in the thick of mischief and is blind to the advantages of peace. Those resembling like men have named him scholar but he is not so. He goes out early morning to collect things whose deficiency is better than plenty, till when he has quenched his thirst from polluted water and acquired meaningless things, he sits among the people as a judge responsible for solving whatever is confusing to the others.

If an ambiguous problem is presented before him he manages shabby argument about it of his own accord and passes judgement on its basis. In this way he is entangled in the confusion of doubts as in the spider’s web, not knowing whether he was right or wrong. If he is right he fears lest he erred, while if he is wrong he hopes he is right. He is ignorant, wandering astray in ignorance and riding on carriages aimlessly moving in darkness. He did not try to find reality of knowledge. He scatters the traditions as the wind scatters the dry leaves.

وَرَجُلٌ قَمَشَ جَهْلاً مُوضِعٌ في جُهَّالِ الاْمَّةِ غادرٍ في أَغْبَاشِ الفِتْنَةِ، عِمٍبِمَا في عَقْدِ الهُدْنَةِ قَدْ سَمَّاهُ أَشْبَاهُ النَّاسِ عَالمِاً وَلَيْسَ بِهِ، بَكَّرَ فَاسْتَكْثَرَ مِنْ جَمْعٍ، مَا قَلَّ مِنْهُ خَيْرٌ مِمَّا كَثُرَ، حَتَّى إِذَا ارْتَوَى مِنْ مَاءٍ آجِنٍك، وَأكْثَر مِن غَيْرِ طَائِلٍ جَلَسَ بَيْنَ النَّاسِ قَاضِياً ضَامِناً لِتَخْلِيصِ مَا التَبَسَ عَلَى غيْرِهِ. فَإِنْ نَزَلَتْ بِهِ إِحْدَى المُبْهَمَاتِ هَيَّأَ لَهَا حَشْواً رَثّاً مِنْ رَأْيِهِ، ثُمَّ قَطَعَ بِهِ، فَهُوَ مِنْ لَبْسِ الشُّبُهَاتِ في مِثْلِ نَسْجِ العَنْكَبُوتِ: لاَ يَدْرِي أَصَابَ أَمْ أَخْطَأَ. إنْ أَصَابَ خَافَ أَنْ يَكُونَ قَدْ أَخْطَأَ، وَإِنْ أَخْطَأَ رَجَا أَنْ يَكُونَ قَدْ أَصَابَ. جَاهِلٌ خَبَّاطُجَهلات، عَاشٍرَكَّابُ عَشَوَات لَمْ يَعَضَّ عَلَى العِلْمِ بِضِرْسٍ قَاطِعٍ، يُذرِي الرِّوَايَاتِ إذْراءَ الرِّيحِ الهَشِيمَ

By Allah, he is not capable of solving the problems that come to him nor is fit for the position assigned to him. Whatever he does not know he does not regard it worth knowing. He does not realise that what is beyond his reach is within the reach of others. If anything is not clear to him he keeps quiet over it because he knows his own ignorance. Lost lives are crying against his unjust verdicts, and properties (that have been wrongly disposed of) are grumbling against him.

لاَ مَلِيٌ وَاللهِ ـ بِإِصْدَارِ مَا وَرَدَ عَلَيْهِ، وَلاَ هُوَ أَهْلٌ لِما فُوّضَ إليه، لاَ يَحْسَبُ العِلْمَ في شيْءٍ مِمَّا أَنْكَرَهُ، وَلاَ يَرَى أَنَّ مِنْ وَرَاءِ مَا بَلَغَ منه مَذْهَباً لِغَيْرهِ، وَإِنْ أَظْلَمَ عَلَيْهِ أَمْرٌ اكْتَتَمَ بِهِلِمَا يَعْلَمُ مِنْ جَهْلِ نَفْسِهِ، تَصْرُخُ مِنْ جَوْرِ قَضَائِهِ الدِّمَاءُ، وَتَعَجُّ مِنْهُ المَوَارِيثُ

I complain to Allah about persons who live ignorant and die misguided. For them nothing is more worthless than the Qur’an if it is recited as it should be recited, nor anything more valuable than the Qur’an if its verses are removed from their places, nor anything more vicious than virtue nor more virtuous than vice.

إِلَى اللهِ أَشْكُو مِنْ مَعْشَرٍ يَعِيشُونَ جُهَّالاً، وَيَمُوتُونَ ضُلاَّلاً، لَيْسَ فِيهمْ سِلْعَةٌ أَبْوَرُمِنَ الكِتَابِ إِذَا تُلِيَ حَقَّ تِلاَوَتِهِ، وَلاَ سِلْعَةٌ أَنْفَقُبَيْعاً وَلاَ أَغْلَى ثَمَناً مِنَ الكِتَابِ إِذَا حُرِّفَ عَنْ مَوَاضِعِهِ، وَلاَ عِنْدَهُمْ أَنْكَرُ مِنَ المَعْرُوفِ، وَلاَ أَعْرَفُ مِنَ المُنكَرِ

Alternative Sources for Sermon 17

(1) al-Kulayni, Usul al-Kafi, I, 55;

(2) Abu Talib al-Makki, Qut, I,290 ;

(3) al-Harawi, al-Jam`, see(4)

(4) Ibn al-'Athir, al-Nihayah (under kh-b-t);

(5) al-Qadi al-Nu`man, Usul al-madhahib,135 ;

(6) al-Tusi, al-'Amali, I,240 ;

(7) al-Tabarsi, al-'Ihtijaj, I,390 ;

(8) al-Mufid, al-'Irshad,109 ;

(9) Ibn Qutaybah, `Uyun, I, 61;

(10) Ibn Qutaybah, Gharib al-hadith, see Ibn Abi al-Hadid, Sharh, I, 90.

Notes

1. Amir al-mu'minin has held two categories of persons as the most detestable by Allah and the worst among people. Firstly, those who are misguided even in basic tenets and are busy in the spreading of evil. Secondly, those who abandon the Qur'an and sunnah and pronounce injunctions through their imagination. They create a circle of their devotees and popularise the religious code of law concocted by themselves. The misguidance and wrongfulness of such persons does not remain confined to their own selves but the seed of misguidance sown by them bears fruit and growing into the form of a big tree provides asylum to the misguided and this misguidance goes on multiplying. And since these very people are the real originators the weight of other's sins is also on their shoulders as the Qur'an says:

And certainly they shall bear their own burdens, and (other) burdens with their own burdens... (29:13)


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