This selection of the passages on God comes after the previous post on the Quran in Nahjul Balaghah. This is extensive in size. The way that I went about compiling by these categories was that I read Nahjul Balaghah and highlighted by color for the broad categories of God, Prophet and Scripture. Under God come the related topics of the angels, Day of Judgement, etc. and of course, God with his magnificent names, attributes and creative power.
It is a meditation so powerful that it could compel you into prostration for eternity in the court of God, if we realized the depth of the statements made here, and elsewhere in the vast corpus of Islamic literature.
1.1-1.1.5
From an oration by ʿAlī, in which he spoke of the creation of sky and earth, and the creation of Adam: 1(The first section (§ 1.1.1) is from ʿAlī’s oration to the Kufans, urging them to regroup to fight Muʿāwiyah, after the Battle of Nahrawān in 38/658. Kulaynī, Kāfī, 1:134.)
I praise God. Yet no speaker can articulate his praise, no reckoner can count his favors, and the most diligent cannot give him his due. Soaring thoughts cannot reach him and deep minds cannot fathom him. He cannot be described, for he is beyond the limits of demarcated boundaries, existing depictions, tallied times, and protracted lifespans. His power created the universe and his mercy sent forth rain bearing winds. Then, to curb its oscillation, he pegged the earth with massive rocks.
The first part of religion is knowledge of God. Knowledge of him is perfected by belief in him. Belief in him is perfected by the declaration of his oneness. Declaration of his oneness is perfected by sincere allegiance to him. Sincere allegiance to him is achieved by negating all attributes ascribed to him, by the testimony of every attribute that it is separate from the thing described, and by the testimony of each thing described that it is separate from the attribute.2 (I.e., the attribute and the thing described are two separate things, they are part of a pair and have “two-ness,” and, as such, neither label can be applied to God, who is one.)
To describe God is to ascribe associates to him. To ascribe associates to him is to ascribe duality to him. To ascribe duality to him is to divide him. To divide him is to undervalue him. To undervalue him is to depict him. To depict him is to circumscribe him. To circumscribe him is to quantify him. To ask, “In what?” is to confine him. To ask, “On what?” is to make another space empty of him.
God is a being but not by coming into being. He is existent but not after non-existence. He is with all things but not by association. He is other than all things but not by detachment. He is an agent but not by movement or instrument. He was all-seeing when there was no creature to be seen. He existed in solitude when there was no friend in whose familiarity he could take comfort, or by whose absence he would be distraught.
God created the world and gave it a beginning. He did this without long mulling, prior experience, generated movement, or stirring aspiration. He made all things in their proper time and combined their parts. He accorded them a particular nature and gave them a specific form. He knew them before he gave them a beginning, cognizant of their limits and consequences, and aware of their connections and complexities. Then he rent the ether, tore up the sky and air, and unleashed a torrent roiling with crashing waves.
He placed the torrent on the back of a stormy wind, a raging tempest. He ordered the wind to hold the torrent in check, dispatched it to fetter the flood, and compelled it to restrict the advancing surf. Below, the air was vast and empty. The water gushed above. Then, he created a barren wind, its control permanent, its current tempestuous, and its perfume wafting. He commanded it to whip up the rolling waters and bring forth mighty waves. The wind churned up the water like cream in a churning skin and tossed it about in the sky, flipping it end over end and mixing the still and the shifting, until it frothed and bubbled and threw up a mountain of foam.
Raising the frothy mixture in the expansive layers of air, in the vast ether, God molded seven skies—the lowest of them a frozen wave, and the loftiest a well-preserved canopy, an elevated firmament— with no pillar for support, and no nails or ropes to bind. Then he ornamented the sky with beautiful stars and bright lights. He set therein a radiant sun and a glowing moon, gliding in that spinning sphere, that moving sky, that flowing, studded expanse.
Then God rent the lofty skies and filled them with ranks of his angels: some continually prostrate, never bowing, others bow, never standing straight, yet others stand in rows, never quitting that position, and yet more chant litanies of his praise, never tiring. Drowsy eyes do not impede them, nor wandering minds, exhausted bodies, or forgetfulness occasioned by lack of heed. Among them, too, are angels God has entrusted with his revelation. Constituting God’s tongues to his apostles, they come and go with his decrees and commands.
Some are charged with protecting his servants, others are gatekeepers at the doors of his Garden. Yet others have feet firmly fixed in the nethermost regions of the earth, while their necks extend beyond the highest heaven, their flanks stretch beyond the land mass, and their shoulders reach the posts of God’s throne. They lower their gaze before him and spread interlocked wings underneath, separated from those below by veils of might and cloaks of power. They do not attempt to picture their Lord through imagination, or apply to him the attributes of created beings, or demarcate him within a location, or depict him with comparisons.
From the same oration, describing the creation of Adam: God gathered soil by sifting coarse earth and fine, sweet earth and salty. He rinsed it with water until it became pure and clean, and moistened and kneaded it until it was smooth and malleable. With this mixture, he molded a form with curves, joints, limbs, and nodes. He let it dry until it hardened, setting it aside for a fixed period of time, until it became firm. Then he breathed into it of his spirit, and it stood before him as a human being. This being had faculties it could harness, a mind it could engage, limbs it could yoke to its service, parts it could use as instruments, and perception with which it could differentiate between right and wrong, tastes and smells, colors, and species. Its clay was a blend of disparate entities, assembled forms, warring opposites, and dissimilar mixtures: hot and cold, wet and dry, painful and joyous.
Then God commanded his angels to fulfill the trust with which he had charged them and discharge the covenant he had enjoined—to prostrate humbly, deferentially, before Adam, in recognition of the honor he had received from God. God said, «Prostrate before Adam, and they all prostrated except Iblīs»1 (Qurʾan, Baqarah 2:34, Ṭāhā 20:116, Isrāʾ 17:61. Iblīs refers to Lucifer.) and Iblīs’s tribe. Pride held them back and wretchedness took over when they boasted of their creation from fire and scorned the creation of clay. God gave Iblīs a respite so that he could earn yet more of God’s wrath, to complete the trial and fulfill the pledge. He said, «You have been placed among those who have been granted respite until the day of destiny.»2(Qurʾan, Ḥijr 15:37–38, Ṣād 38:80–81.)
As for Adam, God gave him a home, with a good life therein and a safe dwelling. He warned him of Iblīs and of Iblīs’s enmity. Iblīs misled Adam, for he was jealous of Adam’s heavenly abode and pious companions. Adam was deceived—he exchanged certainty for doubt and resolve for weakness, his bliss was replaced by fear, his deception was followed by regret. Afterward, God accepted his plea for forgiveness, spoke words of mercy, and promised him a return to paradise, but he nevertheless cast Adam into the abode of tribulation, where his descendants would multiply for generations.
1.2.1
From an oration given by ʿAlī during his return from Ṣiffīn:2 (In 37/657. Alternatively, Ibn Abī al-Ḥadīd (Ḥ 1:143) states that the last line of § 1.2.2, which speaks of truth being restored to its owners, cannot be placed at the time of ʿAlī’s leaving Ṣiffīn but has to have been spoken early in his caliphate, immediately after the pledge of allegiance to him in 35/656.)
I praise God, seeking the completion of his favor, submitting to his might, and entreating his protection against sin. I beseech him, needing only his all-sufficing aid. Whomsoever God guides never goes astray, whomsoever he abhors never endures, and whomsoever he suffices never wants. His praise is the weightiest commodity placed on the celestial scales, and the best treasure one can hoard. I testify that there is no god but God—I render this testimony with firm sincerity and true belief. We, all of us, shall cling to it for as long as God gives us life, relying on it to dispel the terrors we must face, for it is the requirement of our faith and the key to God’s gifts, it pleases the Merciful and banishes Satan.
1.28
From an oration by ʿAlī:2 (This is part of § 1.45, which begins “I praise God, never uncertain of his mercy.” B 221. § 1.28 is also cited in a slightly different recension as § 1.52. All these are parts of a sermon delivered on ʿĪd al-Fiṭr or ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā, presumably in Kufa during ʿAlī’s caliphate. Details in note at § 1.45. (Some lines are also similar in § 1.42). On this oration, see Qutbuddin, “A Sermon on Piety by Imam ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib: How the Rhythm of the Classical Arabic Oration Tacitly Persuaded.”)
The world has shown its back and proclaimed its farewell. The hereafter has approached and announced its arrival. Hark my words! Today is the day of training and tomorrow the race: its goal is paradise, or its end hellfire. Will you not repent of your sins before your death? Will you not perform deeds for your soul before your day of adversity? Hark my words! These are your days of hope and coming up right behind them is death. Those who perform deeds during their days of hope, before the arrival of death, will benefit from their deeds, and death will cause no harm. Those who fall short in performing deeds during their days of hope, before the arrival of death, will have squandered their deeds, and death will cause them harm.
Hark my words! Perform deeds from hope, just as you perform them from fear. Hark my words! I have never seen any who seek paradise or flee hellfire in heedless slumber. Hark my words! Those not helped by right are harmed by wrong. Those not placed on the path by guidance are dragged by error to perdition. Hark my words! You have been commanded to journey and directed to provision. What I fear most for you is the pursuit of desire and lengthy yearnings. Take provisions in this world, from this world, to nourish your souls tomorrow.
Raḍī: If ever words grabbed you by the neck and compelled you to renounce the world and perform deeds for the hereafter, it would be these words, which cut the cords of false hope and ignite the flint of counsel and warning. Among their most wondrous lines are, “Today is the day of training and tomorrow the race: its goal is paradise, or its end hellfire.” For in addition to majestic vocabulary, exalted themes, clear analogies, and effective metaphors, they enfold a wondrous secret and sublime significance in the line, “its goal (subqah) is paradise, or its end (ghāyah) hellfire.” Here, ʿAlī differentiates between the two words because they have different significations.
He does not say “its goal is hellfire” as he says “its goal is paradise” because one races towards something one wants, to a prize one hopes to win, and that is the description of paradise. But this significance does not apply to hellfire—may God protect us from it!—so it would be impermissible to say, “its goal is hellfire.” Rather, ʿAlī says, “its end is hellfire,” because an end is reached by those who are not pleased to reach it as well as by those who are pleased to reach it; it conveys both situations. In the context of this sermon, the word “end” indicates the last stop, the place of final return, as in God’s words, «Say: Take pleasure if you wish! Your last stop is hellfire.»1(Qurʾan, Ibrāhīm 14:30.) It would be impermissible to say here, “your goal is hellfire.” Reflect on ʿAlī’s words, for the signification of this saying is wondrous, its well deep. And this is true for the entirety of ʿAlī’s speech.
1.42
From an oration by ʿAlī:2 (ʿAlī delivered this oration in the Grand Mosque in Kufa immediately following his arrival after the Battle of the Camel in Rajab 36/656. Minqarī, Waqʿat Ṣiffīn, 3–4 (with this text, and further sections of the oration containing political themes). Some lines are similar in § 1.28 and § 1.45. Kulaynī (Kāfī, 8:58) transcribes it as the earlier part of § 1.50, which is placed by Yaʿqūbī (Tārīkh, 2:191) after the arbitration in 37/658. Māmaṭīrī (Nuzhah, 211) attributes the oration to the Prophet, via ʿAlī.)
People! I fear most for you two things: pursuit of desire and lengthy yearnings. Pursuit of desire stops you from seeing the truth, while lengthy yearnings make you forget the hereafter. Take heed! The world is retreating in haste! Only a small residue remains, like dregs in an emptied vessel. Take heed! The hereafter is at hand! And each of the two has children. Be children of the hereafter, be not children of the world, for children will be returned to their mothers on the day of resurrection. Today is the day for deeds, not reckoning. Tomorrow is the day of reckoning, not deeds.
1.45-1.46
From an oration by ʿAlī:1(Two unconnected excerpts from ʿAlī’s sermon on ʿĪd al-Fiṭr or ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā, presumably delivered in Kufa in one of the four years of his caliphate between 36/656 and 40/661. Also part of this sermon is § 1.28 (and its variant recension, § 1.52). B 221, 259. Baḥrānī (B 259) says it is an ʿĪd al-Fiṭr sermon, but, if it is part of § 1.52, and since § 1.52.3 mentions the sacrificial animal, it was more likely delivered on ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā.)
I praise God, never uncertain of his mercy, never empty of his favors, never doubtful of his forgiveness, never grudging in his worship. His mercy never ends, his favors never cease.
The world is an abode whose edifice awaits destruction and whose people await eviction. Sweet and green, she appears to the seeker as a gift and ensnares the viewer’s heart. People! Leave her with the best provisions you can find. In life, do not ask of her more than you need, or seek from her more than you require.
From ʿAlī’s supplication when he began the march to Syria:2 God, protect me from the hardships of travel, a sorrowful end, and the grief of seeing my family, children, and property in ruin. God, you are my companion in this journey and the guardian I leave behind with my family. Only you can do both, for a man who is left behind cannot travel as a companion, and a man who travels as a companion cannot be left behind.
1.48
From an oration by ʿAlī when he marched on Syria:1( ʿAlī delivered this oration on 5 Shawwāl 37 ah (Wednesday, March 17, 658 ad) at Nukhaylah, just outside Kufa, en route to Ṣiffīn. Minqarī, Waqʿat Ṣiffīn, 131–132; B 263 (includes a summary of the vanguard’s commanders and numbers, and of ensuing events); Ḥ 3:201 (further lines from the oration), Ḥ 3:202–215 (details of the events).)
I praise God whenever night spreads and darkens. I praise God whenever stars rise and set. I praise God whose favors are never deficient and whose gifts can never be repaid.
1.49
From an oration by ʿAlī: Praise God, who is concealed in unseen mysteries but confirmed by clear signs. He is hidden from the keenest observer, yet the eye that does not see him cannot deny his existence, while the heart that acknowledges him cannot comprehend him. He is lofty and nothing is loftier than he, he is near and nothing is nearer than he, yet his loftiness does not distance him from his creatures, while his nearness does not place him with them. He has not revealed to intellects his true description, but neither has he veiled them from recognizing him, which they must do. Creation bears witness to the creator and compels the denier to acknowledge him in his heart, but his reality is exalted above whatever is said about him by those who liken him to his creation, or those who deny his existence.
1.52.1-1.52.2
From an oration by ʿAlī, parts of which were cited earlier in a different transmission. We record it again in this transmission because of the variance between the two:3( ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā sermon, as evidenced by its reference to the sacrificial animal (§ 1.52.3). See also the opening lines of this sermon—in Ṣadūq, Man lā yaḥḍuruhu, 1:518; Ṭūsī, Miṣbāḥ, 663— which includes the “God is great” peroration typical of an Eid sermon. The “earlier citation” was § 1.28 (which is also said to be part of § 1.45: B 221, 259); the opening lines of § 1.28 and § 1.52.1 are similar.)
Harken! The world has severed its rope and announced its end, its favors have become strangers and it turns away in speed, it spurs its residents to annihilation and drives its neighbors toward death, its sweetness has turned bitter and its clarity has become turbid, all that remains of it is the last few drops in the jug, the last mouthfuls apportioned with a pebble.4 (The reference is to a pebble (maqlah) placed in a vessel to ration water among a group of travelers; for each person, water was dripped until it covered the pebble, then he sucked those drops from the pebble. Ḥ 3:333; R 1:273; Gh 1:289.) The thirsty man sucks on it in desperation, but it does not even wet his throat.
Servants of God, make ready to quit this abode, for its residents are fated to die. Let not hopes of its permanence take hold, nor suppose your time in it to be long. By God, if you were to moan like bereaved camel mares, supplicate like cooing doves, and intone like praying hermits, or if you forsook property and children to attain nearness to God, to achieve a high station near him, or forgiveness for the sins that are recorded in his accounts and noted by his angels—all this would be little compared with the reward I hope for you and the punishment I fear. By God, if your hearts were to dissolve like salt, if your eyes shed blood in fear and hope, and if you were permitted to live in this world for as long as it continues to exist, your deeds—even with supreme toil and labor—would not repay God’s immense favors, or his guidance of you to faith.
1.60-1.62.2
From an oration by ʿAlī: Hear me! The world is an abode from which you cannot be saved except within it, yet no tribute you offer it will grant you passage beyond its rim. The world tests people with gifts: Whatever they take from it for worldly benefit they must leave behind and account for. Whatever they take from it for the next abode will stay with them forever. To the intelligent, the world is a shifting shadow— one moment you see it spreading and the next it has narrowed to a shard, one moment you see it growing and the next it has disappeared.
From an oration by ʿAlī:1(Additional parts recorded in Sibṭ, Tadhkirah, 145. Some lines are similar in § 1.202; see note on context there.)
Be conscious of God, O servants of God, and outrace your imminent end with good deeds. Trade transient benefits for everlasting gain, prepare to depart, for the call has been given, and brace for death, for it hovers overhead. Be those who wake when shaken, who, knowing that the world is not their home, seek a better abode. God has not created you in vain, nor left you without direction.2 (Modified quotes from Qurʾan, Muʾminūn 23:115, Qiyāmah 75:36.) Nothing stands between you and paradise or hellfire but the arrival of death. Diminished by each passing moment, demolished by each pressing hour, your time to the goalpost is short. That traveler, death, whose camels are steered by Night after Day and by Day after Night will soon be here. Prepare well for this visitor who will bring you immortal triumph or unending misery.
Gather provisions in this world from this world to sustain your souls tomorrow. A servant should fear his Master and be true to his soul, he should hasten to repent and conquer his passions, for his lifespan is veiled from him, his long hopes are false, and he is turned over to Satan, who adorns and encour- ages him to ride the steed of sin, while coaxing him to delay repentance. When he least expects it, fate will attack. O what agony for the heedless man! His life will testify against him, and his days will hand him over to unending misery.
We beseech Almighty God to include us among those who are not made insolent by his bounty, fall short in his obedience, or are seized in death by grief and regret.
From an oration by ʿAlī:1(Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (ʿIqd, 4:163–164) narrates lines from § 1.62.2 as part of ʿAlī’s Radiant Oration (Gharrāʾ), § 1.80. Ṣadūq (Tawḥīd, 41, 43) places it in Kufa, after the arbitration in 37/658, as the praise opening for an oration urging supporters to rally against Muʿāwiyah.)
No state for God precedes another state: he is neither first before he is last nor visible before he is hidden. Other than him, nothing can be described as one.2 (Ar. qalīl, translation after R 1:290, Ḥ 5:155. Alternatively explained as anything understandable in terms of number, unlike God from whom any attribution is to be removed (B 285); or weak (M 1:330).)
Other than him, the mighty are humble, the strong are weak, masters are slaves, the learned are students, and the powerful can fail. Other than him, all observers are blind to subtle colors and ethereal bodies, and all listeners strain to hear faint sounds, are deafened by loud noises, and miss distant echoes. Other than him, nothing that is visible is hidden, and nothing that is hidden is visible.
God did not create us to strengthen his authority or prevent time’s blows, nor for help against an equal’s attack, a partner’s multitudes, or a malicious adversary. Far from it! We are but subservient mortals and humble servants. He does not enter into things, so we cannot say that he exists therein, nor is he distant from them, so we cannot say that he lives apart. Creating did not tire him, nor directing the universe. Weakness did not delay his design, nor doubt enter into his decree. His judgment is perfect, his knowledge exact, his command irrevocable. He is entreated in times of distress and venerated in times of bounty.
1.75
An excerpt from lines ʿAlī used to intone in supplication:1(Kulaynī (Kāfī, 4:432–433) writes that this was ʿAlī’s frequent supplication at the Kaʿbah, perhaps during the hajj pilgrimage, when pilgrims would perform the rite of walking between Ṣafā and Marwah: “Whenever the Commander of the Faithful climbed atop (the hill of) Ṣafā, he would face the Kaʿbah, lift up his hands, and intone (the supplication text).” For further prayers attributed to ʿAlī, see Ḥ 6:178–196 (also includes prayers by Muḥammad and Jesus), ʿAlī, “Prayers and Supplications,” in Quḍāʿī, Dustūr, 176–197; ʿAlī, al-Ṣaḥīfah al-ʿAlawiyyah, passim.)
God, forgive my sins—you know more about them than I do—and if I turn back to them, turn to me with forgiveness. God, forgive the promises I made to myself that you know I have broken. God, forgive the deeds by which I sought closeness to you that my passions then stopped me from doing. God, forgive the lapses of my eyes, the blunders in my words, the errors of my heart, and the slips of my tongue.
1.80-1.80.13
From an oration by ʿAlī that is among his most marvelous, known as Gharrāʾ— “The Radiant Oration”:1(Abū Nuʿaym (Ḥilyat, 1:77–79) records § 1.80.2, 6, 7, 9 and § 1.82.2 as part of an oration ʿAlī declaimed after accompanying a funeral bier.) and deliver his warning.
Servants of God, I counsel you to be conscious of God, who has taught you parables and decreed your lifespans, clothed you in finery and given you a good life, encompassed you in his reckoning and ordained recompense for your deeds, graced you with perfect favors and marvelous gifts, and warned you with convincing arguments. He has reckoned your numbers and appointed your time in this house of trial and abode of instruction—here you are tested and held accountable for what you do.
The world’s water is murky and the path to her waterhole thick with mud. Her beauty dazzles but her reality kills. She is a fleeting deception, a fading light, an ephemeral shadow, and an unsteady support. When the man who shies away from her becomes familiar, when he who is wary relaxes, she gallops away at full stretch, traps him in her snares, targets him with her arrows, and entangles him in the noose of death. She leads him to a narrow bed and a place filled with terror, to live in his new home and be paid back for his deeds. In this way, sons follow fathers. Death keeps cutting off lives, and people keep sinning. They follow the example of those who went before and advance, one heard after another, to the final end—the threshold of annihilation.
Then, when affairs conclude, eons run their course, and the resurrection draws near, God plucks people from the recesses of graves, from the nests of birds and the dens of beasts, and from every pit death has cast them into, and they hasten to answer his command. They rush to him in silent troops, standing upright in straight rows, the eye pierces them and the caller forces them to heed his call, clad in garments of submission, suckling the unholy milk of humiliation and shame. Ruses have vanished, hope is lost, hearts are gripped by terror, voices are hushed and mute, throats choke on sweat like a camel chokes on its bridle-straps, dread pervades, and ears are deafened by the thunderous call to judgment, to the payment for past deeds, be it punishment or reward.
All are God’s servants, created by his power and ruled by his might. They will be seized by death, thrown into graves, transformed into dry bones, and resurrected alone, they will be held accountable for their deeds and singled out for the reckoning. They were given time to seek a way out and were guided to the beaten path, they had a lifetime to take warning and were led out from the shadows of doubt, they were left free to train for the race and contemplate their purpose, to seek a lighted torch and the promised goal. All this they could have done in their allotted time, in the respite granted for action.
What striking parables, what healing counsels! If only they fell on attentive ears, pure hearts, resolute minds, and mature intellects! People, be conscious of God in the manner of one who, when he hears the call, prostrates; if he sins, he confesses; because he fears, he does good; because he dreads, he hastens; attaining certainty, he is virtuous; given lessons, he takes heed; when warned, he recoils; in answering, he returns; if he regresses, he repents; when he emulates, he perseveres; and when shown the way, he perceives. In doing so, he races when he seeks and is saved when he flees.
Thus, he amasses a treasure, purifies his heart, prepares for the return, and gathers provisions for his day of departure, his time on the road, his moment of need, and his state of want. He readies stocks for his final abode. Servants of God! Be conscious of him and attend to the purpose he created you for. Be afraid of him with regard to the thing he warned you to fear him for. Deserve the fulfilment of his promise. Beware the terror of the return.
From the same oration: God has given you ears to hear what they should, eyes to dispel blindness, and a torso that encloses organs and is molded onto ribs; he has divided your forms— for use through a long life—into bodies that can attend to their needs, and hearts that can seek out their sustenance; he has given you these and many more splendid blessings, binding favors, and shelters of health and well-being; he has fixed your lifespans and concealed their duration.
All the while, he has presented you with lessons in the tales of the people who went before you, who enjoyed good fortune and roamed with loosened halters, until fate overtook them and cut off their false hopes, and the termination of their lifespan drove them from their desires, who neglected to provide for themselves when their bodies were sound, nor heed life’s lessons while there was time to choose. Think: Can the youth with rosy skin expect anything but the bowed back of old age? The man of fresh health anything but the hard blows of sickness? The living anything but the moment of perdition, the imminence of separation, the approach of dislocation, the insomnia of anxiety, the pain of burning grief, the throttle of the death rattle, and the futile appeal for help to grandchildren and relatives, friends and colleagues?
Can relatives ward off the ordeal, or wailing women avail, when the deceased are pledged to the dead man’s quarter, when they lie alone in the grave? Maggots tear into their skin and the elements corrode their freshness. Storms erase their traces and routines obliterate their signs. Bodies once rosy of skin decay, and bones once strong desiccate. Souls, mortgaged to their burdens, now see the reality of the unseen. But the time to stock deeds is past, or to atone for transgressions. Are you not the children of the dead, their fathers, their brothers, their relatives? Do you not follow in their footsteps? Do you not walk their road and tread their path? But your hardened hearts cannot absorb a share of belief. You run in the wrong race, too preoccupied to discern. You behave as though someone else is the next target, as though wisdom lies in amassing wealth.
But know this: You too must cross the bridge of death, with its slippery surface, horrifying stumbles, and repeated terrors. So be conscious of God in the manner of a sage whose heart is deep in thought and whose body is emaciated by fear; whose snatches of sleep in the watches of night are interrupted by prayer, and whose hope for reward makes him choose thirst in the scorching hours of the day; whose passions renunciation dampens, whose tongue remembrance spurs on, and who fears God as he should, in order to obtain God’s shelter; who shuns deviation from the straight path, and traverses the middle road to reach his goal; whom delusion’s snares do not entangle and dubious affairs do not blind.
Such a man wins promised delights and blessed repose, a tranquil sleep, and a day of safety. He has crossed the bridge exemplarily, and arriving at the provisions he had sent on, he exults. Because he feared, he hastened; when given a chance, he labored; seeking, he hoped; fleeing, he dodged; in his present, he was mindful of the morrow; with courage, he looked ahead. O people, take heed: paradise suffices as reward and recompense, hellfire as punishment and penalty. God suffices as avenger and bestower of victory, his Book as interlocutor and adversary.
I counsel you to be conscious of God, who alerted when he cautioned, and justified his claim when he showed you the way. He warned you against the enemy who steals into breasts with stealth, and whispers into ears in secret; who misguides and leads into hell, and promises with vows that are false; who makes the evilest of crimes look attractive, and trivializes terrible sins—then, when he has deceived your soul and secured your collateral, he pronounces repulsive what he had bedecked and grave what he had dismissed, and he threatens you with the very things from which he had promised safety.
From the same oration, describing the creation of humans: Look at this human, whom God created in the darkness of the womb, in layers of coverings, whom he transformed from a drop of gushing semen to a formless blood-clot, then to a fetus, a suckling babe, a child, and a youth. God bestowed on the human a heart that can remember, a tongue that can speak, and eyes that can see, so that he may learn when taught and refrain when admonished. But then, when he attained a balanced figure and his body stood up straight, he turned away in arrogance and bucked like a sun-struck camel, toiling only for worldly gain, and drawing up huge buckets from the deep wells of his passions. Seeking only ecstatic pleasures and wishful fancies, he neither heeded the approaching menace nor humbled himself before God.
And so he died pursuing pleasure, having lived for a moment, jolly in his sins, then leaving without fulfilling obligations or earning reward. Sudden fate attacked him as he galloped headstrong in his merry path. That day, he col- lapsed like a sun-struck camel, that night, he lay tortured by agonies of pain and convulsions of illness. Onlookers—a blood brother, a doting father, one woman crying woe, another beating her chest—stood by. Then he was seized by consuming paroxysms, intense distress, and painful groans, in an excruciating extraction and a most severe end. Then he was wrapped in the cloths of a shroud and moved hither and thither, passive at all times and submissive. Then his body, emaciated by disease and destroyed by illness, was tossed on a plank, and carried by his sons’ children and his brothers’ attendants to the house of exile and the state of separation.
Finally, when those who had come to bury him had turned back and the grieving mourners had gone away, he was made to sit up alone in his tomb to face a frightening interrogation and a terrible ordeal. People, know that the afterworld’s greatest torment is the Pit-of-Boiling-Liquid, the Blaze-of-Hellfire, the Conflagration-of-the Inferno.1 It allows no period of rest, no alleviating respite, no shielding force, no soothing sleep, and no relief in a final death. This is all there is: death after death and hour after hour of torture. «Indeed, we belong to God, and to him we shall return.»2 Truly, in God we seek refuge.
Servants of God! You were given long lives that you enjoyed, knowledge that helped you understand, respite that you squandered in play, and security that made you careless. You were given a long reprieve and beautiful gifts, warned of punishments, and promised rewards. Bearers of eyes and ears, health and wealth, beware of sins that hurl into the abyss, and transgressions that incur God’s wrath! Do you see escape, deliverance, refuge, shelter, retreat, or return? No? Well, then, «how are you deluded,»3 where are you directed, and what is deceiving you?
Your share of the world, in all its length and breadth, is but the measure of your body as it lies with cheek in the dust! Servants of God! Take heed now, this very moment, while halters remain loosened and spirits untethered, while you have time to seek guidance and a body that is sound, with a remainder in your respite, the freedom to choose, a chance to repent, and room to move. Take heed before the calamity descends and straits narrow, before fear prevails and destruction sets in, before the arrival of that visitor who will surely arrive, and before you are seized by the Powerful, Almighty Lord.
1.82-1.83.4
From an oration by ʿAlī:3(§ 1.82.2 (also § 1.80.2, 6, 7, 9) are recorded by Abū Nuʿaym (Ḥilyat 1:77–79) as part of an oration ʿAlī declaimed after accompanying a funeral bier.)
I bear witness that there is no god but God, who has no partner. He is the first, for there was nothing before him, and the last, for he has no end. Minds cannot find a way to describe him, hearts cannot comprehend his nature, dis- secting or deconstructing cannot grasp him, and eyes and hearts cannot take him in.
From the same oration: Servants of God! Take counsel from valuable lessons, warning from blazing signs, caution from powerful warnings, and benefit from reminders and counsels! Imagine that death’s talons have pierced you and hope’s threads are severed, that calamitous events have crushed you, and fate has driven you to the waterhole that is common to all. «Each soul is accompanied by its driver and its witness»1 (Qurʾan, Qāf 50:21.)—a driver who steers it to the place of accounting, and a witness who testifies to its deeds.
From the same oration describing paradise: It has distinct ranks and diverse stations. Its blessings never end, its residents never leave, its occupants never age, and its inhabitants never want.
From an oration by ʿAlī:2(§ 1.83.3 (and § 1.171.2) are recorded by Minqarī (Waqʿat Ṣiffīn, 10) and Abū Ḥanīfah al-Dīnawarī (Akhbār, 152–153) as part of ʿAlī’s first Friday sermon in Kufa (36/656). § 1.83.4 is recorded by Ḥarrānī (Tuḥaf, 150) as part of “The Brocade (Dībāj) Oration,” also recorded in § 1.107; Mufīd (Amālī, 206) prefaces this section with “ʿAlī used to say.”)
God knows your thoughts and discerns your feelings, he encompasses all things, subjugates all things, and controls all things.
Do good in your time of respite before the end of your lifespan, in your time of leisure before other things preoccupy you, in the time you draw breath before your throat chokes. Provide for your soul and secure it a high rank. Take provisions from the home you will leave for the home you will reside in forever.
People! Fear God in this: guard his Book, which he has asked you to pre- serve, and uphold his rights, which he has asked you to hold in trust. He has not created you in vain, nor left you without direction,3(Modified quotes from Qurʾan, Muʾminūn 23:115, Qiyāmah 75:36.) nor ignorant and blind.
He records your acts and knows what you do, and he has decreed what your lifespan will be. Sending you the Book with its clear exposition,4( Modified quote from Qurʾan, Naḥl 16:89.) God let his Prophet live among you through numerous seasons, until, by what he revealed in his Book, he perfected for him and for you the faith he was pleased to call his own.5(Modified quote from Qurʾan, Māʾidah 5:3. I have added the word “faith” (Ar. dīn) from the Qurʾanic verse to clarify the reference and meaning.)
Expressing approvals and disapprovals on his Prophet’s tongue, as well as prohibitions and commands, God justified his claim to you, placed his proof before you, advanced his warning to you, and cautioned you of imminent and harsh chastisement. People, use your remaining days to rectify your wrongs and devote yourselves to that task, for your remaining days are few compared to the many you have squandered carelessly and in total neglect of admonition. Don’t give yourselves undue license for that will lead you down the path of tyrants, don’t be duplicitous for that will steer you into sin.
Servants of God! He who counsels himself best, best obeys his Lord, while he who deceives himself most, most disobeys his Lord. He who cheats himself is truly cheated, he whose faith is safe is truly joyful, he who learns from the example of others is truly fortunate, and he who is misled by desire and conceit is truly wretched. Know this: If you do good to show off even a little, you assign partners to God, and when you keep company with the dissolute, you forget your faith and summon Satan. Stay away from lies for they weaken faith. The truthful stand on the threshold of salvation and honor, while liars stand at the rim of the abyss and the edge of abasement. Don’t envy one another, for envy consumes faith just as fire consumes kindling. Don’t hate one another, for hate destroys. 1(Lit. “[Hate] is the Shaver (innahā al-ḥāliqah),” an opaque metaphor interpreted variously to mean that hate (1) erases all good and blessings (ʿA 595); (2) cuts people off from one another (B 344); (3) harms faith (M 1:428); and (4) destroys society (R 1:359; Ḥ 6:357).)
Know this: false hope diverts the mind and causes you to forget God.2(The usual rendering of amal (translated here as “false hope”) is simply “hope.” In the Arabic oratorical tradition, though, particularly in ʿAlī’s sermons, the word invariably refers to the false hope that you will live forever, while it is the word rajāʾ that usually denotes positive hope. The phrase translated as “causes you to forget God” ( yunsī al-dhikr) literally means, “makes you forget the remembrance,” here, of God (B 344), and the hereafter.) Don’t place your faith in it for it is nothing but deception and its friend is wholly deceived.
1.87-1.88.8
From an oration by ʿAlī: God is recognized without being seen, a creator who did not need to deliberate. He was existent and present from eternity, when there were no mansion-filled skies,2(Reference to the signs of the zodiac, Qurʾan, Burūj 85:1.) no inaccessible veils,3(Refers to “inaccessible veils of divine light,” Ḥ 6:394; R 1:372–373.) no dark nights, no tranquil seas, no craggy gorges,no twisting ravines, no outspread earth, and no legged creatures. God is the originator of all creation and its inheritor, the maker of all creation and its sustainer. The sun and the moon strive for his pleasure as they wear out the old and bring near the far. He apportions our sustenance and reckons our traces and deeds. He enumerates our breaths and our glances, the secrets our bosoms hide, and our places of rest and passage in wombs and loins until our final end.
His punishment crushes his enemies, despite the vastness of his mercy, while his mercy enfolds his devotees, despite the harshness of his punishment. He subjugates his challengers, destroys those who defy him, humbles his opponents, and overthrows his foes. He suffices those who trust him, he gives to those who beseech him, he repays with favors those who extend him a loan of their deeds, and rewards those who thank him. Servants of God! Weigh yourselves before you are weighed, judge yourselves before you are judged, breathe before your throats constrict, go meekly before you are shoved. Finally, know this: if a man is not guided to combat his own passions, if he cannot counsel and admonish himself, no other counselor, no other admonisher, will avail.
From an oration by ʿAlī known as Ashbāḥ, “Ethereal Forms,” one of the most marvelous of orations. Masʿadah ibn Ṣadaqah narrated the following from Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq, who said: The Commander of the Faithful delivered this oration on the pulpit of Kufa, when a man approached him and asked, Commander of the Faithful, describe for us what our Lord looks like exactly so that our love and knowledge may increase. ʿAlī, outraged at the blasphemy, called loudly, ⟨Gather for the ritual prayer!⟩ and when the people crammed into the mosque, ʿAlī ascended the pulpit, pale with anger.
He praised God, pronounced benedictions on the Prophet, then said:1(This introduction is from manuscripts M and Y, and is also found in Ṣadūq, Tawḥīd, 48. Manuscript N and Rāwandī’s commentary (R 1:374) have the following version: “The oration was delivered in response to a man who asked ʿAlī to describe God for him in a way such that he could almost see him with his eyes. Angered, ʿAlī said [the text of the oration].” The commentaries of Baḥrānī (B 361) and Ibn Abī al-Ḥadīd (Ḥ 6:398) amalgamate both versions. I have added the words “at the blasphemy” for clarity; ʿAlī’s anger, as it becomes clear from this alternative preface and from the oration text, is at the anthropomorphic views implicit in the man’s question. ⟨Gather for the ritual prayer!⟩ is a dictum pronounced in early Islam to gather people for a momentous announcement. On its origin and early usage, see Qutbuddin, Arabic Oration, 202.)
Praise God, whom withholding does not make richer nor munificence and generosity impoverish, for giving depletes every giver’s store except God’s, and every withholder is blameworthy except him. He is the Munificent Giver who bestows increasing favors and manifold gifts, and all creatures are his children—he guarantees the sustenance they receive, ordains the food they eat, and paves the way for people to petition him and seek his bounty. In fact, he is as generous in granting what they do not ask for as he is in granting what they do. He is the first, with no before, so nothing could exist before him, he is the last, with no after, so nothing will exist after him. He prevents the pupils of our eyes from capturing or grasping his image.
Time never changes for him, so his condition will never change, nor is he in a place, so his location will never change. If he distributed all that mountain depths yield and smiling seashells emit, from nuggets of silver and native gold to forests of coral and fistfuls of pearl, this would not affect his generosity or deplete his vast possessions. The appeals of all the people in the world do not exhaust his treasure. He is the Generous Giver. Supplications do not empty his wellsprings and persistence does not make him withhold.
See it this way, O seeker: Accept what the Qurʾan tells you about God and seek light from its radiant guidance. As for the questions that Satan burdens you with, questions not mandated for you by the Book or reported in the Prophet’s Sunnah and the Imams’ guidance, consign their knowledge to God. That is God’s ultimate right over you. Know this: Men rooted in knowledge do not attempt to force themselves through fortified barricades but accept the veiled mysteries whose details they lack as they are presented to them. They admit their inability to grasp things beyond their compass, which God praises them for, and he calls their abstention—the abstention from delving into things whose essence he has not burdened them with investigating— deep knowledge.1 (Ar. rusūkh, echoes Qurʾan, Āl ʿImrān 3:7, «Men rooted in knowledge» (al-rāsikhūna fī al-ʿilm).)
You, too, limit yourself to this boundary, and do not measure God’s greatness by the measure of your intellect—if you venture there, you will perish. He is the All-Powerful Being. If the imagination sends scouts to survey the extent of his power, if minds free of Satan’s whisperings attempt to penetrate the deep mysteries of his kingdom, if bewildered, yearning hearts walk in the way of his attributes, and if sharp intellects whose descriptions fail to capture him attempt to open the door to his essence, he repels them, one and all. They wander the deep and dark ravines of his mysteries to find a way to him, but, knocked hard on their foreheads, they are made to turn back, admitting that no aggression will plumb his core,2 (“Aggression” (jawr al-iʿtisāf ), is also interpreted as “turning away from the main road” (Ḥ 6:409; R 1:383), or “extreme wanderings in those stations” (B 369).) and no reflection will glimpse the magnitude of his might.
He created the world with no model, no plan measured by a creator worshipped prior to him. He showed us his powerful kingdom, the wonders articulated in the traces of his wisdom, and the world’s frank admission that it needs his strong grip to remain standing— thereby he provided the proof that compels us to acknowledge him. Traces of his artisanship and signs of his wisdom can be seen in the marvels he made. Everything he created offers proof of his existence and guides us to him, even silent objects, for their design speaks of that proof, and it guides us toward their Creator.
I bear witness that anyone who likens you to the disparate limbs of your creatures, or to their bonded joints that your clever design has concealed, has erred. His inner self has not recognized you, and his heart is not certain that you have no peer. He does not appear to have heard of followers disowning those they followed, saying, «By God, we were clearly misguided when we equated you with the Lord of the worlds!»1(Qurʾan, Shuʿarāʾ 26:97–98.)
They lie who compare you! They lie when they liken you to their idols, when their imagination adorns you with the ornaments of your creatures, their notions divide you into physical parts, and their intellects measure you against the multiplicity of your creatures’ faculties. I bear witness that to equate you with any of your creatures is to compare you, and to compare you is to profess unbelief in the clear verses you have revealed, in the witness provided by your eloquent signs. For you are God. Intellects with their penetrating thoughts cannot analyze your totality, nor hearts with their reflections limit or position you.
From this oration: He planned the things he created with precision, arranged them with elegance, and led them in a certain direction, where they do not transgress the limits of their station, fall short of their goal, or pull back when commanded to proceed. How could they, pray, when all affairs transpire according to his will? He generated categories of things without relying on cogitation, engaging an inner disposition, drawing on experience obtained from the rise and fall of eons, or using a partner’s help to originate his wondrous affairs.
His creation was thus completed, and it bowed to him in obedience, and answered his call, unhindered by sluggish delay or laggardly indolence. He straightened out what was crooked, laid out its boundaries, harmonized its contrasting parts, bound the cords of linked entities, and distributed all into various species with distinct parameters, values, dispositions, and forms. Such was the beginning of God’s creatures, each crafted with exquisite precision, produced and originated by his will.
From the same oration, describing the sky: When God created the sky, he hung its spaces together without ropes, soldered the gaps in its parts, and connected them closely, each with the other.2(Ar. azwāj, interpreted as its “analogs” (R 1:377; Ḥ 1:419), “other celestial objects” (ʿA 600), or “the angels” (B 373).) He smoothed its knobby ladder for beings who descend with his command, and ascend with his creatures’ deeds.3(Those who descend and ascend are the angels. B 373–374; R 1:388.)
He called out to it while it was entirely smoke,1(Reference to Qurʾan, Dukhān 44:10.) and its crevices became sealed. He cracked its locked doors open and set blazing sentinels in the gaps, restraining them with his own hands from falling through breaks in the firmament and commanding them to remain where they were. He made the sun a sign that brightens the day and the moon a sign that wanes through the nights.2(Reference to Qurʾan, Isrāʾ 17:12.)
He set the two in motion within their orbits and ordained their passage within their tracks. By their movements, he distinguished night from day, and by their measure, he showed the «reckoning and calculation of years.»3(Qurʾan, Yūnus 10:5.) Then he suspended the sky’s sphere in the ether, hung ornaments of starry clusters and bright lamps,4(Reference to Qurʾan, Ṣāffāt 37:6.) used blazing meteors to strike down spying demons,5(Reference to Qurʾan, Ḥijr 15:18. I have specified the word “demons” based on the previous verse (Qurʾan, Ḥijr 15:17): «We protected it from every cursed demon.») and launched the stars according to their stations: fixed versus moving, falling versus rising, and ominous versus lucky.
From the same oration, describing the angels: Then God created wondrous angels to populate his skies and inhabit his kingdom’s highest planes. With them he filled the gaps in its rifts and the fissures in its ether, and in those gaps, in that sacred enclosure, in veils of concealment and canopies of glory, their thunderous chanting of his praise rings out.
Behind the roar that deafens the ear shines the majesty of light that dazzles the eye, and the eye is driven back at this boundary. He fashioned them in different forms, in diverse ranks, each «with sets of wings».6(Qurʾan, Fāṭir 35:1.)
They chant litanies of praise for his glorious power, never claiming that they helped shape his creatures, nor professing to have created, alongside him, a single, solitary thing. In this, he has no peer. «Rather, they are his honored servants, they speak when he has spoken, and act on his command.»7(Qurʾan, Anbiyāʾ 21:26–27.)
He entrusts them with his revelation and sends them to his messengers bearing his commands and prohibitions. He shields them from doubt and uncertainty, so not one strays from the path of his pleasure. He equips them with aid and assistance, and infuses their hearts with deference, with humility, peace, and calm. He eases their path to glorifying him and erects beacons to illumine for them the signs of his unity. They are never weighed down by sins, or loaded, like camels, by the calamities brought by nights and days. Suspicion’s arrows don’t penetrate the robust frame of their belief, presumptions’ rasps don’t fray the strong cords of their convictions, the fever of malice doesn’t burn their bonds, perplexity doesn’t pillage recognition of God from their hearts or plunder veneration of God and awe for his grandeur from their breasts, and the devils with their whisperings don’t dare to sow doubts or cast lots for controlling their thoughts.
Among them are angels created as heavy clouds, or with the massive dimensions of lofty mountains, or as dark as the starless night, angels whose feet pierce the nethermost regions of the earth and look like white banners protruding in the air. A gentle breeze below confines them inside the farthest limits they can reach. God’s worship is their sole occupation, faith’s realities provide them with the means to recognize him, and certainty in his existence severs them from all else save yearning for him. Their desires seek what he bestows, never crossing to seek another’s favors. They taste the sweetness of his recognition and drink from the full cup of his love. His fear is rooted deep in their hearts, so they bend their backs in protracted worship. Lengthy petitions do not exhaust the store of their entreaties, and closeness to him does not loosen the cord of their submissiveness.
No vanity aggrandizes for them their prior acts, while the humility generated in them by glorifying God leaves them no room to glorify their own deeds. No intervals of languor interrupt their protracted efforts, and no diminishing expectations make them question the hopes they have placed in their Lord. Long prayers do not parch their tongues, nor preoccupations weaken their raised voices. Their shoulders do not sag as they worship, standing in ranks, nor do they relax their necks and so fall short in carrying out his command. No dullness or disregard vanquishes their resolve, no deceiving passions vie to shoot down their high aspirations. They choose the Lord of the Throne to be the treasure they put by for their day of need, and they go to him with petitions when others go to his creatures. Their journey to perfect his worship never ends, and their passion for embracing his obedience stems from their hearts’ inner substance, which is ever infused by hope in him and fear. No severance of the cord of dread makes them lessen their labors, no ensnaring greed makes them favor flighty acts over serious effort.
They do not aggrandize their past deeds, else complacent hope would have expelled their palpitating trepidations. No Satanic dominion puts them at vari- ance among themselves concerning their Lord: no evil sundering of ties divides them, no rancor caused by mutual envy takes hold, no calamitous doubts separate them, and no contrary aspirations—like a horse with one blue eye and one black—fragment them.1(Ar. akhyāf, said of people who are “different, one from another, in their states or conditions, or in their forms, shapes or semblances;” from khayafa, which means, “having one of the eyes blue, the other black; said of a horse, or any animal.” Brothers who are akhyāf are “sons of one mother but different fathers.” Lane, Lexicon, s.v. “Kh-Y-F.”)
Captives of faith, no deviation, deflection, exhaustion, or lassitude frees them from its lasso. In all the skies’ layers, there exists no place, not even the width of a strip of rawhide, that does not contain a prostrating angel or a swift messenger. Their long worship continually increases their knowledge of their Lord, and the grandeur of their Lord’s might ever increases in their hearts.
From the same oration, describing the earth and how he laid it out over water:
God poured earth into the mighty, heaving waves and the deep, swollen seas, where waves towered and clashed, and waters raced and crashed, as they grunted and frothed like a camel stallion in arousal. Weighed down by the earth’s mass their recalcitrant gallop became tractable, crushed by the earth’s torso their tumultuous tossing subsided, and dragged along by the earth’s withers they submitted with docility. After their earlier clamor, the waves grew still and were conquered. Tamed with the curb of servility, they were herded in defeat and captivity. The earth ensconced itself then, spreading in the depths of the flowing current, repelling its pride, haughtiness, disdain, and excess of energy, and muzzling its overabundant flow.
After much vaulting and supercilious assault, the waters abated. When the water’s tumult had grown still under the earth’s wings, under the weight of the soaring, lofty mountains placed on its shoulders, God made springs of pure water gush from the towering massifs and channeled them into outstretched wastelands and undulating furrows. He anchored the earth’s movements with massive rocks and high-topped, stony crags. Sunk deep beneath its surface, rupturing the smooth hollows of its crust, and straddling the backs of its plains and compacted soils, the mountains caused the earth’s heaving to still. He opened wide the space between the earth and the ether, and made the air fit for the earth’s residents to breathe. Then, with all preparations complete, he extracted from it and introduced to it its living inhabitants. In all of this, he did not neglect those barren tracts too high for springs and beyond the reach of rivers. He created swollen clouds to bring life to those bare stretches and coax out their vegetation. Piecing together wispy swirls and scattered puffs, he shaped a thick, enveloping cloud. Then—when its deep waters roiled, when lightning flickered from its hands, when flashes in the massed white-and-black cloudbanks and the heaped rainclouds awoke from their slumber—he let it loose in one continuous downpour.
The cloud hung low and hugged the earth, and the South Wind milked its teats to yield torrents and spills. When the cloud had settled its limbs on the ground, when it had dropped all the water it had drawn and carried, he brought forth plants from the barren ground and herbage from the bare mountains. The earth now rejoiced in the beauty of its meadows, it flaunted its garments of delicate blossoms and its necklaces of fresh flowers. All this he created to sustain humans and nourish cattle. He then hewed passes in remote regions and erected beacons for those who would walk the open roads.
1.88.10-1.88.11
God knows all secrets. He knows the thoughts of those who conceal what they are thinking, the clandestine conversations of those who whisper, stray notions generated by wild conjectures, secured resolutions arising from certainty, stolen glances flashed by drooping eyelids, veiled matters of the heart, deep-welled mysteries, the sounds to which ears stealthily hearken, the summer nests of tiny ants, the winter habitats of mites, the repeated wails of mourning women, the sound of faint footsteps, the place hidden within the innermost sepal where fruit begins to grow, the concealed spaces in mountain hollows and riverbeds where wild beasts hole up, the cracks between the boles and bark of trees in which gnats hide away, the node on a branch from which a leaf sprouts, the basin where semen is deposited after flowing through the waterways of men’s loins, the forming of the new clouds and their thick amassing, the abundant flow of raindrops from towering cloudbanks, what the whirlwinds stir up with their kicking gusts, what the rains erase with their flood water, how tumbleweeds are swept by the wind over dunes of sand, the resting places of birds atop the high mountain peaks, the warbling of birds in the dimness of their nests, what seashells store and waves on the deep water envelop, what a black night conceals and bright daybreak reveals, what is prevailed on in alternation by layers of darkness and splendors of radiance, the trace of every footstep, the sensation of every movement, the echo of every word, the motion of every lip, the resting place of every creature that breathes, the weight of every tiny particle, the sobbing of every grieving heart, and whatever is on the earth,1(Lit. “on it,” explained in the commentaries as “on earth.” Ḥ 7:30; B 392; R 1:418.) including the fruit growing on a tree, a falling leaf, the resting place of a drop of semen, the place where blood gathers in pools and where an embryonic clump of flesh congeals, and the emergence of creatures and offspring. In all this, God suffers no toil, no obstacle obstructs him from guarding his creation, and no stupor or apathy impedes him from executing his affairs or governing his creatures. Far from it! His knowledge penetrates them, his reckoning comprehends, his justice encompasses, and his favors engulf. All this, despite how short they fall in offering his due.
God, to you belong the loveliest epithets and the largest armies. When solicited, you are the best repository of hope, and when petitioned, you are the best receptacle of trust. God, you stretch out your hand to me with such favors that I can praise none but you, extol none but you, I do not direct my praise toward those who are founts of disappointment or sites of suspicion, for you have diverted my tongue from praising the children of Adam, from extolling your creatures and subjects. God, every extoller deserves a reward that compensates, a gift freely bestowed by the one he extolls: I beseech you to guide me to the treasures of your mercy and the riches of your forgiveness. God, here I stand before you. I have singled you out with the proclamation of unity that is your due, and I see no one worthy of these tributes and praises but you. My need of you is urgent. Nothing but your kindness can heal my destitution’s broken bones, nothing but your beneficence and generosity can raise me from my lowly state of privation. So grant us your acceptance now as we stand before you, and free us from spreading our hands before any but you. You are powerful over all that you will.1(Reference to Qurʾan, Āl ʿImrān 3:26, Taḥrīm 66:8.)
1.91-1.91.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:1(Excerpt from a famous long oration that ʿAlī delivered in Kufa after the arbitration in 37/658, urging his followers to regroup and fight Muʿāwiyah (Ṣadūq, Tawḥīd, 41, 72). Iskāfī (Miʿyār, 255) says it is part of the Luminous Oration (Zahrāʾ), which also includes § 1.106 and § 1.158.)
Blessed is God! Vaunting aspirations cannot attain him, swift intellects cannot find him, he has no limit and will not expire, he has no boundary and will not cease to be.
1.93
From an oration by ʿAlī:
Praise God! He is the first—there was nothing before him. He is the last—there is nothing after him. He is the manifest—there is nothing above him. He is the hidden—there is nothing below him.
1.98.1
He is the first before every first and the last after every last, his firstness dictates that he has no beginning, and his lastness dictates that he has no end. I bear witness that there is no god but God; my thoughts match my declaration, my heart matches my tongue.
1.99.1
From an oration by ʿAlī with similar content:3(Part of an oration—that includes § 1.98 and § 1.126—which ʿAlī delivered in Basra immediately after the Battle of the Camel in 36/656. B 480; ʿAbd al-Zahrāʾ, Maṣādir, 2:202, 203, 288.)
On that day, God will assemble all who went before and all who came after, standing, necks bowed, to be interrogated for the judgment and receive payback for their deeds. Sweat will streak their cheeks like straps of a bridle, and the ground beneath them will tremble. The best any man can hope for is space for his feet and room for his frame.4(Ar. nafs, translated here as “frame,” also means “life,” “person,” and “soul.” Differently vocalized as nafas, it can also mean “breath” (Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v. “N-F-S”). My translation is based on Ḥ 7:102; B 411.)
1.103-1.103.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:1(Excerpt from an oration that ʿAlī delivered in his home, either in Medina or Kufa, additional parts of which are recorded as § 1.69, and sayings § 3.26 (about the four pillars of belief) and § 3.259 (ʿAbd al-Zahrāʾ, Maṣādir, 4:214–216). It is related that ʿAlī was asked by an associate to describe belief (īmān), and ʿAlī instructed him to come back the next day, so that others could hear it too. He did return, presumably with others.
ʿAlī then delivered this oration and instructed that it be written down and read out to the public (Kulaynī, Kāfī, 2:49). Kulaynī (ibid.) names the associate as ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Kawwāʾ, while Ghazālī (Iḥyāʾ¸ 4:60) names him as ʿAmmār ibn Yāsir (if so, the oration would have been delivered before Ṣiffīn, in 37/657, when ʿAmmār was killed). Alternatively, § 1.103.1 is also cited as an answer given during an oration in the mosque in Basra, a few days after the Battle of the Camel in 36/656 (Māmaṭīrī, Nuzhah, 224–225). Other parts of the same oration in ibid., 221–233 are listed in note to § 1.23. § 1.103.1 is similar to § 1.154.2.)
Praise God who paved the path of Islam, made it smooth for those who come to its waterholes, and protected its ramparts from attackers. He made it a source of security for those who cling to it, a place of safety for those who enter it, a proof for those who argue by it, a witness for those who litigate with it, a light for those who seek illumination by it, comprehension for those who understand, reason for those who ponder, a sign for those who search for pasture,2(Or, for those who perceive hidden things (tafarrasa). B 420; R 1:455; Ḥ 7:122.) perception for those who resolve to advance, a lesson for those who take heed, salvation for those who believe, support for those who trust, comfort for those who submit, and a shield for those who endure. Islam’s paths are lit, its trails marked,3(Or, its inner workings are clear. B 420.) its beacons high, its highway bright, its lamps aglow, its arena honorable, its goal elevated, its racehorses numerous, its prize sought, and its champions noble. Its path is faith, its road good deeds, its end death, its racecourse the world, its track the day of resurrection, and its prize paradise.
1.105.1
Praise God, who appears to his creation through his creation and manifests himself to their hearts through his proof. He created without cogitation or thought, for cogitation and thought only come from those who have an inner disposition—and God does not possess an inner disposition in his self. His knowledge rends the hidden veils of mystery and encompasses beliefs stored in the innermost recesses of peoples’ hearts.
1.106.1-1.106.4
From an oration by ʿAlī:5(Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (ʿIqd, 4:166–169) says this is ʿAlī’s “Luminous Oration” (Zahrāʾ), which also includes § 1.91 and § 1.158.)
Everything bows to him, and everything exists through him. He is the wealth of the poor, the might of the humble, the strength of the weak, and the refuge of the desperate. If someone speaks, he hears, if someone stays silent, he knows their secret, while someone lives, he provides them sustenance, and when someone dies, it is to him they return. God, eyes cannot see you, so they cannot inform about you. Indeed, you existed before any of your creatures who could describe you. You did not create them because you felt lonely or because they would bring you benefit. Those you pursue cannot outrun you, those you seize cannot escape. Those who disobey you do not lessen your authority, those who obey you do not bolster your kingdom, those who are unhappy with your decree cannot deflect your command, and those who turn away from your command still need you.
For you, all secrets are open, all mysteries evident. You are eternal without end, the terminus from where there is nowhere to flee. Yours is the promised meeting from which there is no escape, your hand holds the forelock of every four-footed beast, to you returns every living being. Glory to you! How wondrous the marvels we see of your creation, yet how small its greatness alongside your power! How grand what we see of your kingdom, yet how humble in comparison with what is hidden from us of your might! How perfect your blessings for us in this world, yet how small against the blessings of the hereafter!
From the same oration: You created angels, whom you lodged in your skies and raised above your earth. Of all your creatures, they know you best, fear you most, and are closest to you. They were never housed inside loins, enveloped in wombs, created from a lowly drop of sperm, or dispersed by fate’s calamity. But despite their station near you and their position by your side, despite the absorption of their desires in you, the scale of their obedience for you, and their absence of inattention to your command—if they were to plumb your hidden depths, they would deem their deeds trivial and reprimand themselves. They would know that they have not worshipped you as they ought or obeyed you as you deserve.
Glory to you, revered creator whom we worship! Bestowing a great favor on your creatures, you created a dwelling and placed therein a banquet of food and drink, spouses, servants, palaces, streams, grain, and fruit. Then you sent someone to invite people in—but they did not answer the call, show interest in what you encouraged them to do, or evince passion for what you enthused about. Instead, they fell upon a rotten carcass, and, to their deepest shame, they devoured it and fell in love with it.1 (The house is paradise (see descriptions of paradise in the Qurʾan, e.g., Baqarah 2:25, Āl ʿImrān 3:15, Furqān 25:10), the caller is Muḥammad, and more generally, each prophet, and the carcass is this world (B 434; Ḥ 7:206–207).)
Love blinds the eye and makes the heart ill—the lover sees with blurry eyes and listens with deaf ears, passions ravage his mind, and the world, his beloved, kills his heart and consumes his soul. He thus becomes a slave to the world and to all who possess anything of her, wherever she goes he follows, and wherever she turns he turns. He pays no heed to God’s warning and takes no counsel from God’s lessons. All the while, he sees the heedless abruptly taken from her to a place from which there is no return, and he sees the terror they had denied descend upon them. He sees them leave the world in which they had taken comfort, and move to the afterlife as they had been warned. The horror that descends upon the dying person is beyond words. As the anguished convulsions of death and the remorseful pangs of loss together bear down upon him, his extremities begin to lose feeling, and his color changes.
Then, death penetrates further and prevents him from speech. He lies among his family, seeing them with his eyes, hearing them with his ears, still able to discern, still able to understand. He can think only about his wasted life and squandered time. He remembers the wealth he has amassed, both licit and illicit, from honest and dubious sources. The sins he has gathered now weigh him down, now, when he is about to leave everything behind. The people who survive him will enjoy his wealth. Its gratification will belong to another, while the burden will weigh down his back. His debt has come due for payment. He bites on his knuckles, regretting the misdeeds that are now clear to him, caring little for the things he craved all the days of his life. He wishes that the person who envied him his wealth and coveted his property had taken it all!
Meanwhile, death continues to penetrate his body and it pierces his hearing. Now he lies among his family, his tongue unable to speak, his ears unable to hear. His eyes go from face to face, he sees their tongues moving but cannot hear their words. Then death tightens its grip. His sight is taken away, just as his hearing had been earlier, and his soul leaves his body. He becomes a corpse lying amid his family, and they recoil from him in fear and back away—he cannot console those who weep or answer those who call out. Then they carry him to a grave marked with lines in the earth. They give him over to his deeds and cease to visit.
Until destiny reaches its term and the affair approaches its ordained hour, when the last of creation has caught up with the first and God’s command arrives to renew his creation, he shakes the sky and splits it, convulses the earth and agitates it, plucks out each mountain and uproots it, and, terrified by his majesty and cowed by his power, each crushes the other. He extracts all who are on earth, renewing them after their decay, gathering them after their separation. Then he stands them, each in his place, to be interrogated about deeds and secret acts. He divides them into two groups, blessing the one and punishing the other. He rewards the obedient with nearness to his divine self and with eternal life in his abode, which its inhabitants never leave, where their condition never changes, misfortunes never befall, illness never takes hold, dangers never approach, and journeys never displace.
He locks up the disobedient in the abode of horrors. He shackles their hands to their necks, binds their forelocks to their feet, clothes them in garments of pitch, and dresses them in robes of fire. He throws them into the chamber of torture, whose heat endlessly sears, whose door remains bolted, and whose blaze rages with rabid hunger, clamorous tumult, sheets of flame, and terrifying thunder. Its resident never leaves, its captive is never ransomed, its shackles are never broken. This abode has no limit, so it never ceases to be. Its people have no lifespan, so the terror never ends.
1.107
From an oration by ʿAlī:1 The deeds that bring you closest to God are the following: belief in him and his messenger; jihad in his path, for it is Islam’s summit; the testament of sincerity—⟨There is no god but God⟩—for it is the natural state; performing the ritual prayer, for it is the way of truth; offering the alms levy, for it is a mandated obligation; fasting in the month of Ramadan, for it is a shield from God’s punishment; performing the hajj and the ʿumrah pilgrimage to Mecca, for they dispel poverty and wash away sins; fostering close ties with kin, for it increases wealth and prolongs life; giving alms in secret, for it expiates transgressions; disbursing alms in public, for it wards off horrible forms of death; and acts of charity, for they protect you from dishonor and shame. Fill yourself with God’s remembrance for it is the best remembrance. Wish for everything he promised the pious, for his promise is the truest of promises. Follow the guidance of your Prophet, for it is the best guidance. Follow his Sunnah, for it is the most righteous of practices.
1.109
From an oration by ʿAlī in which he spoke of the Angel of Death and the manner in which he takes souls:2(Excerpt from a long oration on God’s unity (tawḥīd). B 448.)
Do you sense his presence when he enters a home, or see him when he takes someone away? In fact, do you know how he takes the life of a fetus from inside its mother’s womb? Does he enter through one of her limbs, or does its spirit answer the angel with God’s permission, or is he residing with it already inside the mother? How can we who are incapable of describing a creature like us aspire to describe our creator?
1.111-1.111.2
From an oration by ʿAlī:1(Ṭūsī (Amālī, 443) prefaces § 1.111.2 by saying, “The Commander of the Faithful would say,” indicating that the theme and words were frequent in ʿAlī’s oration; Naḥḥās (ʿUmdah, 1:353) cites it in an oration attributed to Zayd ibn ʿAlī.)
Praise God who has linked praise with favors and favors with thanks. We praise him for his blessings, as we praise him for his trials. We ask him to rally our hearts, which are slow to undertake his command and quick to rush into what he has forbidden. We ask his forgiveness for everything we have done that his knowledge encompasses and his inventory includes—that knowledge never falls short, and that inventory never omits. We believe in him, as though we have already seen the deep mysteries and attained the promised reward— our sincerity refuses to assign partners to him, and our certainty rejects all doubt. We bear witness that there is no god but God, he has no partner, and Muḥammad is his servant and messenger, a testimony that assures our prayers’ and our deeds’ ascent to God—no scale on which it is placed is light, no scale from which it is absent has weight.
Servants of God, I counsel you to be conscious of him, to be pious. Piety is the best provision for the journey and the best means of return, for it is the provision that will get you to your destination and the return it promises is assured. A perfect caller has called toward it and a perfect listener has taken it to heart—that caller was effective, and that listener will win entry to paradise.
1.112
From an oration by ʿAlī beseeching God for rain: God, our mountains are parched, and our plains have filled with dust. Our sheep have gone mad with thirst and stand dazed in their pens.2 (Ar. dawābbunā, lit. livestock, or pack animals. The use of the term marābiḍ, which are pens for sheep, rather than mawāṭin, which are pens for camels (Ḥ 7:264), appears to specify sheep.)
They moan like bereaved mothers, too exhausted to look for pasture or search out water- holes. God, have mercy on their panic when they head out, and their sad cries when they return! God, we have come to you in this open space because lean years of drought, like emaciated camels, have hemmed us in, and clouds that promised rain approached but turned away. You alone are the sufferer’s hope and the petitioner’s provider. We call out to you in this time when people have lost heart, when rainclouds have withheld their bounty, and grazing animals have perished.
Do not hold us hostage to our deeds or punish us for our sins. Unfold your mercy for us with torrential clouds, abundant herbage, and wondrous vegetation. Send us rain in a heavy downpour that revives what had died and restores what was lost. God, we beseech you for water that is reviving, quenching, perfect, universal, fragrant, blessed, wholesome, and fertile. Let it bring forth plants that flourish, trees full of fruit, and leaves fresh and green. Let it revive your weak servants and renew your barren lands. God, we beseech you for water that makes our highlands verdant, our lowlands lush, our countryside fertile, our fruits grow, and our sheep thrive. Let it irrigate our farthest lands and soak our nearby areas.
Shower your vast grace and rich blessings on us, your destitute human creatures, and your forsaken beasts. Send us a soaking, gushing, drenching sky in which one deluge drives away another and raindrops jostle for space—a sky whose lightning does not deceive, whose clouds do not disappoint, whose puffs do not dissipate, and whose drizzle does not usher in cold, barren winds. Let its fertility irrigate the lands struck by famine, let its felicity revive the people hit by drought. You are the one who sends rain after all hope is gone, you are the one who pours down your mercy, you are the protector, the one worthy of all praise! 3(The last two lines are modified from Qurʾan, Shūrā 42:28.)
Raḍī: An explanation of the rare words in the oration: ʿAlī’s saying “our mountain meadows are parched (inṣāḥat)” means they have cracked from the effects of the drought; the Arabs use the same verb for a garment if it is torn, and a plant if it dries up and withers. ʿAlī’s saying “our sheep have gone mad with thirst (hāmat)” means they are thirsty; huyām means thirst. ʿAlī’s saying “emaciated camels of drought (ḥadābīr)” uses the plural of ḥidbār, a female camel made gaunt by hard travel, to which he compared a drought-stricken year. Dhū al-Rummah said: Emaciated camels (ḥadābīr) fodderless in the night when they kneel down to rest, or ridden hard into the desert wastes. In the phrase “whose puffs (qazaʿ) do not dissipate,” qazaʿ are small and scattered wisps of cloud. The phrase “whose drizzle does not usher in barren, cold winds (shaffānin dhi-hābuhā)” actually means “whose drizzle is not a bearer of cold, barren winds”; shaffān is a cold, barren wind, and dhihāb are light showers of rain; the word “bearer (dhāt)” is elided because the hearer would know it is implied.
1.130-130.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:
I give praise to God for what he has taken away and what he has granted, for what he has gifted to us and what he has tested us with. He is aware of all that is hidden and present with all that is concealed, he knows all that hearts cover and all that eyes disclose. Thus, with my thoughts the same as my declaration, and my heart in accord with my tongue, I testify that there is no god other than he, and that Muḥammad is his chosen messenger.
1.131-1.131.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:
This world and the hereafter have submitted their reins to God, the skies and the earth have handed him their keys, and the blossoming trees prostrate to him at dawn and at dusk. From their branches, his luminous flames are kindled, and in response to his words, they bring forth their harvest of fruit. 1(References in this section are to Qurʾan, Ḥajj 22:18, Yāsīn 36:80, Baqarah 2:265.)
1.141-1.141.2
From an oration by ʿAlī in which he supplicated God for rain:
Hark! The earth that carries you and the sky that shades you obey their Lord. They favor you with their generous blessings not because they pity you, or seek to endear themselves to you, or hope for your reward, rather, they have been commanded to provide you with benefit and they obey, they have been appointed to ensure your welfare and they comply. Hear me! When God’s servants do evil things, he tests them by reducing fruits, curtailing blessings, and locking away treasures, so that any who are stirred to repent, to stop sinning, to listen to reminders, and to heed reproach, may do so.
God has made a man’s quest for forgiveness the cord that releases sustenance, and his mercy for the world, and he instructs, «Ask your Lord for forgiveness, for he is ever forgiving—he will make the sky pour rain and provide you with wealth and children.»1(Qurʾan, Nūḥ 71:10–12.) May God show mercy to the person who hastens to repent, renounces sin, and races against death!
God, we have ventured out to you from under shades and shelters, prompted by the heartrending groans of our cattle and our children. We seek your compassion, implore your abundant blessings, and fear your punishment and retribution. God, give us water to drink, send us rain! Do not place us among the disheartened, do not destroy us with years of drought,2(Lit. “Do not destroy us with those years.” Reference to Qurʾan, Aʿrāf 7:130, where Pharaoh’s people are seized with years of drought.) do not take us to task for what the foolish among us have done,3(Reference to Qurʾan, Aʿrāf 7:155, where Moses’s people beg forgiveness for having worshipped the Golden Calf.)
O most compassionate one! God, we have ventured out under the sky to complain of things that are not hidden from you: rough constrictions have made us desperate, ruinous droughts have caused us anguish, extreme indigence has made us weak, and severe trials have banded against us. God, we beseech you, do not turn us away with empty hands! Do not send us back battered by grief! Do not chastise us for our sins! Do not measure us by our deeds! God, spread over us your rainclouds, your grace, your sustenance, and your compassion. Give us water, beneficial, quenching, and refreshing. Let it cause to grow what has withered and revive what has died. Give us drenching rain that yields abun- dant, ripe fruit. Let it quench plains, make pools overflow, urge trees to leaf and food prices to come down. Doubtless, you are powerful over all that you will.
1.147
From an address by ʿAlī just before his death:1(Part of a testament—that includes § 2.23—delivered in his home in Kufa in 40/661, where he was carried after the deathblow. Kulaynī, Kāfī, 1:299.)
People! Each person shall meet what he flees as he flees,2(Reference to Qurʾan, Jumʿah 62:8.) for death is the place toward which the soul is driven and running away only brings it closer. How many days I wasted searching for the answer to this mystery, but God would not allow it to be revealed! Far from it! A guarded piece of knowledge! My testament is this: Hold fast to God and do not assign him partners. Hold fast to Muḥammad and do not squander his Sunnah. Erect these two pillars, kindle these two lamps, and, as long as you do not bolt from their stable, no blame will attach to you.
1.150-1.150.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:2 (From the beginning of ʿAlī’s caliphate in Medina, in 35/656. Ḥ 9:153; R 2:91; B 515.)
Praise God, who demonstrated his existence through his creatures, his eternity through their temporality, and his singularity through their resemblance to one another. But although veils cannot conceal him, neither can senses grasp him, for the craftsman and the handicraft, the delimiter and the delimited, the master and the servant, are mutually distinct. He is one but not in the sense of numbers, the creator but not through movement and effort, the hearer but not with an appendage, the seer but not through an organ, the witness but not by being present, the separate but not through distance, the manifest but not through vision, and the hidden but not because he is transparent.
He is separate from all things, for he subjugates and wields power over them, and all things are separate from him, for they bow and return to him. To describe him is to circumscribe him, to circumscribe him is to quantify him, and to quantify him is to deny his eternity. To ask “How?” is to seek a description of him, to ask “Where?” is to confine him. He was knowledgeable when there was nothing to be known, Lord when there was no one to be Lord over, and powerful when there was nothing over which to wield power.
1.153-1.153.2
From an oration by ʿAlī in which he describes the wondrous creation of the bat:
Praise God! Descriptions are too feeble to plumb his core, for his majesty curbs intellects from reaching the limits of his kingdom. He is God, real and clear, too real, too clear, for eyes to see. Intellects cannot delineate his boundaries—he can never be likened to another. Imaginations cannot capture him—he can never be pictured as another. He created without paradigm, advice, or help. His command brought forth a perfect creation, which bowed to him in obedience, responded without defiance, and submitted without fighting.
Among the sublimities of his craftsmanship and the marvels of his creation are the profound mysteries he has shown us in these bats. They are constricted by light which causes other creatures to emerge, and drawn out by darkness, which causes other beings to seek shelter. See how he caused their eyes to be dazzled by the sun’s brilliance, instead of using the sun to guide their movements, or harnessing its light to visit their haunts. See how he curbed them with the sun’s very brilliance from flitting about in its majestic gleams, how he restrained them in their caverns from setting out in its intense glare. They let their eyelids droop during the day over their pupils and use the night as a lamp to guide them toward sustenance. The darkening gloom does not impede their sight, its black obscurity does not hinder their movement. But as the sun removes its veil and the morning glimmers, as its bright rays penetrate the lizard in its hole, the bats shut their eyelids and settle down with the food they were able to collect in the shadows of the night.
Glory to him who made night for them as daylight hours, as the time to gather food, and daylight hours the time for rest and tranquility! Glory to him who created their wings from flesh! Wings they use to propel themselves in flight, that look like bow-shaped ears and have no feathers or quills, but in which you can see their clearly marked fingers; 1(Ar. ʿurūq (sing. ʿirq), lit. “roots” or “veins,” translated as “fingers” based on modern zoology.) two wings, not so thin as to tear, but not so thick either that they would weigh down their bodies. When bats fly, their pups cling to them for shelter, swooping and rising with their mothers when their mothers swoop and rise. They do not fly off until their limbs are strong, and their wings can support them, until they can find their own way to food and safety. Glory to the creator of all things, who created without following another’s paradigm!
1.154.3
Emerging from the repose of graves, they set off for their destined end;4(I.e., paradise or hellfire.) each abode receives its residents, and they are never removed from it, or given another, forever after. Commanding good and forbidding evil are traits of divinity, they will not hasten your death or decrease your sustenance. Hold fast to God’s Book: it is the strong rope, the clear light, the effectual cure, the quencher of thirst, the adherent’s protection, and the devotee’s salvation; it never becomes crooked and needs straightening, or deviates and needs to be forced back; it is not worn out by the tongue’s recitation or frayed by the ear’s audition—whoever affirms it speaks the truth, whoever acts upon it wins.
1.155.1-1.155.2
From an oration by ʿAlī:3(Oration delivered in the mosque of Basra, a few days after the Battle of the Camel in 36/656 (Māmaṭīrī, Nuzhah, 233–235).)
Praise God, who made praise the key to his remembrance,4(“The Remembrance (Dhikr)” is also one of the names of the Qurʾan, the first Surah of which begins, “Praise God, Lord of all the worlds,” Qurʾan, Ḥamd/Fātiḥah 1:1. Ḥ 9:210; R 2:106–107.) the means to increasing his bounty,5(The Arabic word for “praise,” ḥamd, also includes the meaning of “thanks,” and this is what is intended here, as a reference to the Qurʾanic verse, “If you give thanks, we shall increase your blessings.” Qurʾan, Ibrāhīm 14:7; B 531; Ḥ 9:211; R 2:107.) and a sign of his blessings and glory. Servants of God! Time’s river flows on with those who are alive, just as it swept away those who are now gone. The part that has gone will never return, and the part that is present will not remain.
The last of its actions are like the first, its affairs outrace each other, its banners reinforce each other, and the final hour pushes you forward as a rough herdsman drives his thirsty camels to the waterhole. Whoever occupies himself with anything other than his soul stumbles in darkness and is ensnared in catastrophe, he is incited by his devils to persist in depravity and to pile on the evil deeds they adorn in his eyes. Paradise is the destination of those who are quick to believe, hellfire the destination of malefactors. Servants of God! Know that piety’s fortress is mighty, while immorality’s citadel is easily breached—it neither protects its people nor shields those who seek its refuge. Listen to me! Piety heals the scorpion-sting of sin. Certainty carries you to the ultimate goal.
Servants of God! Fear God and look to the direction of your own soul, the one most precious to you and beloved, for God has shown you the path of truth and illumined its course: the end is either unshakable wretchedness, or eternal bliss. Stock up in the days that will expire for the days that will endure, for you have been shown where to find provisions, commanded to load up, and encouraged to set out. Yours is a halted caravan unsure of when it will be instructed to resume. Harken and listen! What does someone created for the hereafter want with this world? What does someone whose possessions will soon be plundered—indeed, while its burden and reckoning will remain— want with gold and livestock?1( Ar. māl, which signifies movable wealth, including gold and silver, livestock, and grain.)
Servants of God! There is no reason you should refrain from the good for which God has promised reward or seek the evils he has forbidden! Servants of God! Fear the day when deeds will be examined, earthquakes will intensify, and infants’ locks will turn white. Servants of God, know this: Your own self surveils you, your own limbs spy on you, and truthful chroniclers record your deeds and count your breaths. Dark nights cannot veil you from them, nor locked doors keep you concealed. Tomorrow is close to today.
Today, with all that is in it, will soon pass, and tomorrow will follow. It is as though each one of you has already reached his place of solitude inside the earth, that pit marked with lines. What a lonely residence! What a menacing domicile! What a forlorn exile! Imagine that the thunderclap has already pealed, the last hour has already come, and that you have already emerged for the final judgment, falsehoods uncovered, excuses obliterated, truths come to the fore, and matters having taken their course. Learn from exemplary lessons, benefit from warnings, beware the conversion of blessings into punishment!
1.158-1.158.2
From an oration by ʿAlī:2(Iskāfī (Miʿyār, 257) and Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (ʿIqd, 4:167) state that § 1.158 is part of the Luminous Oration (Zahrāʾ), which also includes § 1.91 and § 1.106.)
His command constitutes judgment and wisdom, his acceptance constitutes safety and mercy, he judges with knowledge and forgives with clemency. God, we offer you praise for what you grant and what you take back, for what you heal and what you inflict. We offer the praise most acceptable to you, the praise most liked by you, the praise most excellent in your eyes. We offer you praise that fills the bounds of your creation and attains the limits that you will it to attain. We offer you praise that is neither veiled from you nor falls short in reaching you. We offer you praise in sums that never end and gifts that never run out. We do not know the essence of your majesty. All we know is that you are alive, existent, neither slumber overtakes you nor sleep,1(Modified quote from Qurʾan, Baqarah 2:255.) neither glances perceive you nor eyes. You see all eyes, you reckon all lifespans, you seize people by forelocks and feet.2(Modified quote from Qurʾan, Raḥmān 55:41.)
How little we understand of your creation, how inadequately we marvel at your strength, how feebly we describe your great power! That which is hidden from us, which our eyes fall short of, which our intellects fail to attain, which the veils of mystery prevent us from discerning—that is far greater. Anyone who clears his heart and applies his mind to comprehend how you established your throne, originated your creation, suspended the skies in the air, and spread the earth on heaving water will have his glances befuddled, his intellect bedazzled, his ears bewildered, and his reason bemused.
From the same oration: You claim that you place your hopes in God. Great God, what lies! What is it with you! These hopes do not show in your actions! When you place your hopes in anyone, your hopes show in your actions, except for the hopes you say you place in God, which are insincere. Every fear you feel is real except your fear of God, which is a sham. You expect from God what is great, and from God’s servants what is small, but you offer to God’s servants what you don’t offer to your Lord!
How is it that your actions for God—may his praise be exalted!— fall short, when you do so much for God’s servants? Are you afraid that you may be making a mistake in relying on God, are you worried he may not be the right place in which to lodge your hopes? Likewise, when you fear one of God’s servants, you render to him the awe born of fear that you don’t render to your Lord—you render your fear to God’s servants in ready cash, while you make your fear for God a deferred promise. Indeed, those whose eyes find the world grand, whose hearts find it imposing, give it preference over God. When this happens, they become its devotees and servants.
1.159
I place my trust in God and turn to him. I seek his guidance in finding the path that will lead to his Garden and direct me to his pleasure. Servants of God! I counsel you to be conscious of him and obey him, for that will bring you salvation on the morrow and eternal deliverance. He cautioned you to beware and gave full warning. He directed you to earn reward and gave complete measure. He described the world to you and told you of its severance, its transience, its departure. People, turn away from everything in it that excite your wonder, because it will not be with you for long. This world is the domicile that is closest to God’s anger and farthest from his pleasure.
Servants of God, be certain of its separation and mutability, turn your eyes away from its griefs and occupations, be true to your soul and work hard for it, fear the world’s dealings, and learn from the generations before you that you have seen die. Their limbs fell asunder, their ears and eyes ceased to function, their grandeur and might were lost, their happiness and joys were severed. In place of proximity to their children they were given loss, in place of the companionship of spouses they were given isolation. They no longer boast, or procreate, or visit, or associate. Servants of God, beware! Control your passions, restrain your desires, and use your intellect! The matter is clear, the banner is erect, the road is compact, and the path is straightforward.
1.161.1-1.161.2
From an oration by ʿAlī:4(Delivered in the Grand Mosque of Kufa, presumably during ʿAlī’s caliphate 35–40/656–661, in response to an unnamed Jewish man from Yemen who asked him to describe the Lord (Ṣadūq, Tawḥīd, 78–79).)
Praise God, who created his servants, unfurled the earth, filled valleys with streams, and covered highlands with green. His primacy has no beginning, and his perpetuity never concludes, he is first without ceasing, and eternal without end, foreheads touch the ground before him, and lips declare his oneness. He demarcated all the entities he created to differentiate between their likeness and him.5(Thus, if read as lahū (ms M, Y, commentaries Ḥ 9:252, B 544, ʿA 634). If read as lahā (ms Sh, H, and commentaries Kaydarī, 2:126, F 273): “to differentiate them from each other.)
Imaginations cannot evaluate him with perimeters and movements, nor with limbs and instruments. It cannot be asked of him, “When?” nor can a limit be set for him by saying, “Until.” He is the manifest about whom no one can ask, “From what?” and the hidden, about whom no one can ask, “In what?” He is neither a form that can be destroyed, nor is he veiled and thus encompassed. He is neither near to things by adherence nor remote from them by separation. An unblinking gaze, an echoing word, an approach to a hilltop, a lengthening of step—none of his servants’ actions are hidden from him, even in the darkest night, even in motionless dusk. The moon shines above the darkness, and the blazing sun follows, rising and setting in the rotation of eras and eons, with nights advancing and days in retreat.
He is before every end and term, every reckoning and calculation. He is exalted above every description ascribed to him: attributes of quantity, terminal points in space, location in dwellings, and fixedness in place. Limits are specified for his creation—they relate only to beings other than him. He did not create things from eternal fundamentals or timeless principles. Rather, he created what he created and established its limit, he shaped what he shaped and made it beautiful. No one can withstand his power, just as no one can seek to benefit him by obeying him. His knowledge of the dead equals his knowledge of the living, his knowledge of what is in the lofty skies equals his knowledge of what is in the nethermost regions of the earth.
From the same oration:
O you who have been created with harmonious proportions, carefully nurtured in the darkness of wombs and the multiplicity of veils. You began as «an extraction of clay»1(Qurʾan, Muʾminūn 23:12.) and were placed in «a safe abode for a known term»2 (Qurʾan, Mursalāt 77:21–22.) and an ordained duration. You quickened in your mother’s belly as a fetus, never answering a call or hearing a shout. Then you were brought out of your dwelling to an abode you had not witnessed, and whose benefits you did not know how to attain. Who guided you then to suckle from your mother’s breast? Who showed you in your time of need the place where you could obtain what you sought and wished for? One who is incapable of describing a being with form and appendages is even more incapable of describing the creator, far from it! He is even further from being able to grasp the creator through the definitions of created beings.
1.163-1.163.3
From ʿAlī’s oration in which he describes the wondrous creation of the peacock:
God created wondrous creatures, living beings, inanimate bodies, still objects, and things that move, and he set up clear testimonies to his sublime craftsmanship and great power, impelling intellects to recognize and submit to him. Proofs of his oneness cry out to our ears, including the birds that he created in a multitude of forms, that he lodged in the furrows of the earth and in the crevices of its mountain passes and mighty crags. Possessing many kinds of wings and different shapes, all are controlled by the rein of subjugation, yet soar in spaces within the vastness of the ether and the wide-open skies. He brought them from non-being into being in marvelous forms. He fitted joints to sockets and covered them with flesh. He made some birds bulky, preventing them from rising easily into the sky, and causing them to flutter and flap on the ground. He fashioned them all differently, in diverse hues, with his sublime power and precise craftsmanship. Some he gave a single unadulterated color, others he dyed with a color iridescent with the sheen of a second hue.
The most marvelous of birds in the manner of its creation is the peacock, which is formed by the creator in the most congruent harmony, with its colors arrayed in the best possible way, with wings of interlacing, golden feather-shafts, and a tail with a lengthened train. When it approaches the hen, the peacock spreads out the folds of its tail and lifts it high over its head, like a Dārī sail hoisted by a boatman.1 (Dārī is a relative adjective from Dārīn, the name of the main settlement on an island near Qaṭīf, on the eastern coast of present-day Saudi Arabia. In pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, Dārīn was the main port of Bahrain, through which musk was imported from India. Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-buldān, 2:432, s.v. “Dārīn”; B 549; Ḥ 9:268.)
It struts haughtily in its many colors and swaggers dragging its train. It mates in the manner of the cockerel, leaping onto the female and inseminating it. I relate this to you from observation, not as one whose narrations are based on weak attribution.2 (Although not native to the Arabian Peninsula, peacocks were common in the Persian empire, and the commentators state that ʿAlī would have seen them in Kufa. Ḥ 9:270; Jāḥiẓ, Ḥayawān 7:170, 186.)
Even if it were the case, as some believe, that the peacock inseminates through a teardrop emitted by its tear ducts and poised on the edge of its eyelids, and that the female imbibes it then lays eggs,1(In Hindu mythology, peahens self-impregnate by drinking the tears of peacocks, which are celibate (brahmachārī), and to laud ascetics, Lord Krishna wears a peacock feather in his crown.) rather than through insemination by a male with a fluid other than his teardrop, that would not be more marvelous than the mating of crows through mutual feeding.2 (In ancient Arab folklore, crows mate by exchanging inseminating fluid through their beaks, and their proverb says, ⟨more hidden than the mating of a crow⟩. Details and caveats in Ḥ 9:270; Jāḥiẓ, Ḥayawān, 3:177, 3:464, 7:244. I have added “mating” in the translation to clarify this context.)
You would think the shafts of the peacock’s feathers silver combs and the astonishing halos and suns that sprout from them coins of pure gold and shards of green emerald! If you were to compare them to the earth’s produce, you would call it a bouquet of spring flowers. If you were to liken them to garments, you would say they are an embroidered robe, or a beautiful Yemeni turban. If you were to equate them with jewelry, they would be bezelled gemstones of different colors rimmed with studs of silver. The peacock struts, haughty and exultant, it fans its tail and wings and laughs out loud, relishing its beautiful dress and its many-hued scarf. But when it looks at its legs, it cries out in pain with a voice that reveals its need for help and testifies to its real suffering, for its legs are scrawny, like the legs of a drab cockerel, and a small spur juts out from its shinbone. In its crest, though, it has a beautiful crown of green feathers, while the curve of its neck is shaped like the mouth of a water-jug, and underneath, its belly is like the cobalt-blue dye of Yemen, or like silk cloth draped on a polished mirror.
It appears wrapped in a veil of purest black, except that its luster is so intense and its sheen so bright that it is as if fresh green is mixed in with the black. At the slit of its earhole, there is a line like the fine edge of a reed-pen, snowy white in color like the chamomile flower, and its whiteness gleams against the blackness that prevails there. There is hardly a color it does not have a share of, and that has not been enhanced further by a unique polish, gleam, sheen, and radiance. It looks like scattered flowers untouched by spring showers or full summer suns. Sometimes, it sheds its feathers, as if stripping off its clothes; they fall off, one by one, then grow back altogether. They fall from their shaft-roots like leaves from a branch, then grow and connect, until they come back the way they were before; the new colors are no different, and not a single color appears in the wrong place. If you examine just one of the plumules growing from the shaft, it will display the red of a rose, the green of an emerald, and even at times the yellow of pure gold. Not even the deepest of minds and the most gifted of intellects can find a way to describe this creature, so how can words be mustered to illustrate it? Even the smallest of its parts is so splendid that it exceeds the grasp of imagination and surpasses the descriptions of tongues.
Glory to the one who has dazzled intellects, who has rendered them incapable of describing a creature that he placed in the open, where eyes could perceive its outline, shape, structure, and color! He made tongues incapable of describing it succinctly and rendered them too weak to give its depiction full due. Glory to the one who gave strong structures to all creatures, from ants and gnats to whales and elephants, and who pledged to himself that no form he has infused with spirit shall move, without death being its end, and destruction its goal!
From the same oration, describing the celestial garden: If you gaze with your heart’s eye at the wonders described for you of paradise, your soul will loathe the marvels of this world, its sensualities, pleasures, and gilded landscapes. You will lose yourself in heaven’s rustling trees whose roots are buried in dunes of musk on the banks of its rivers, in the clusters of brilliant pearls that hang from their branches, in the fruits that burst from their sepals that can be gathered without effort and delight the gatherer.
You will see the residents of heaven’s pavilions and arcades, who are served pure honey and rich wine; they lived in this world nobly until, at last, they settled in a permanent home, with no further need of travels and journeys. If you were to task your heart truly, O listener, with reaching these wondrous landscapes, your longing soul would leave your body right now, and you would hasten from this assembly here to the company of the people of the grave! May God, in his mercy, place us among those whose hearts strive to reach the abode of the pious!
1.163.4
Raḍī: Explanation of some of the rare words in this oration: As for ʿAlī’s words, “it leaps on the female and inseminates it (wa-yaʾurru bi-mulāqaḥah),” “leaping on” alludes to copulation; it is said, “he leaped on the woman, he leaps on her,” if he copulates with her. As for ʿAlī’s words, “as though it were a Dārī sail hoisted by a boatman (ka-annahū qalʿu Dāriyyin ʿanajahu nūṭiyyuhu),” qalʿ is a ship’s canvas sheet, and Dārī is related to Dārīn, a sea town through which perfumes are imported; “hoisted (ʿanaja)” means he made it turn; it is said “I hoisted the female camel;” “I hoist it a hoisting,” if I make it turn; nūṭī is a seaman. As for ʿAlī’s words, “ḍaffah of its eyelids,” he meant the sides of its eyelids; ḍaffah means side. As for ʿAlī’s words, “bits ( filadh) of green emerald,” filadh is the plural of fildhah, which means piece. As for ʿAlī’s words, “clusters of brilliant pearls (kabāʾis al-luʾluʾ al-raṭb),” kibāsah (clusters) means bunch, ʿasālīj (branches) are tree limbs; the singular is ʿuslūj.
1.169
From ʿAlī’s prayer when he had resolved to fight the enemy at Ṣiffīn:2(Intoned just before the battle at Ṣiffīn, 37/657. Minqarī, Waqʿat Ṣiffīn, 232; Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 5:14–15.)
God! O Lord of the lofty sky and layers of air, you made the sky and air the marshland into which night and day are absorbed, the course where the sun and moon orbit, and the space through which the moving planets sail. You populated it with tribes of your angels, who never tire of your worship. O Lord of this earth, you made the earth a home for humans, a place for insects to crawl and cattle to roam, and a habitat for countless other creatures, seen and unseen. O Lord of the mighty mountains, you made the mountains anchors for the earth and a refuge for your creatures. Hear our prayer: If you grant us victory over our enemy, then hold us back from treachery and direct us to follow the truth. If you grant them victory over us, then honor us with martyrdom and save us from sedition.
1.170-1.170.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:1(In Basra, in 36/656, soon after the Battle of the Camel (reference to the battle in § 1.170.4). § 1.170.4 is cited as an answer given during an oration in the mosque in Basra, a few days after the battle (Māmaṭīrī, Nuzhah, 228); other parts of the oration as cited in ibid., 221–233, are listed in the note to § 1.23. The reference in § 1.170.2–3 is to the Shūrā Council that elected ʿUthmān in 23/644. Ḥ 9:305.)
Praise God, from whose vision one sky does not conceal another, one earth does not conceal another.
1.176.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:1 (After ʿUthmān’s assassination, at the beginning of ʿAlī’s caliphate, in 35/656, in Medina. B 579; Ḥ 10:62; Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, ʿIqd, 4:157.)
No matter can preoccupy him, no time can alter him, no place can encompass him, and no tongue can describe him. Nothing escapes his reach— not the droplets in water, nor the stars in the sky, not the dust-raising winds in the air, not the crawling of ants on rocks, not the sleeping of insects in the dark night. He knows the falling of leaves and the blinking of eyes. I bear witness that there is no god but God. I do not equate him with another, or doubt him, or reject his religion, or deny his creation. This testimony comes from one whose intention is true, whose motives are pure, whose certainty is limpid, and whose scales are heavy.
1.177
From an address by ʿAlī when Dhiʿlib, the Yemenite, asked him, “Commander of the Faithful, have you seen your Lord?” ʿAlī replied, “Would I worship what I do not see?” Dhiʿlib asked, “How do you see him, then?” ʿAlī answered:3 (Early in ʿAlī’s caliphate in Medina, 36/656: ʿAlī ascended the pulpit of the Prophet’s mosque wearing the Prophet’s mantle and sword, and said to the people, “Ask me before you lose me” (§ 1.187). Dhiʿlib, a renowned and audacious orator, stepped forward with this question, hoping to dumbfound him. ʿAlī answered with these lines, and Dhiʿlib, repentant, fell in a swoon. Ṣadūq, Amālī, 423, § 55.)
Eyes do not see him through physical observation, but hearts perceive him with true belief. He is near to all things without touching them, yet far from them without being apart. He speaks without the need to reflect, wills without the need to aspire, and crafts without the need for hands. He is sublime but cannot be described as concealed. He is mighty but cannot be described as harsh. He is all-seeing but cannot be described as having eyes. He is merciful but can- not be described as having compassion. All faces bow to his majesty. All hearts tremble in awe.
1.180.1-1.180.3
From an oration by ʿAlī. Nawf al-Bikālī reported: The Commander of the Faithful addressed us in Kufa, standing on a rock placed for him by Jaʿdah ibn Hubayrah al-Makhzūmī. He was wearing a simple wool garment, his sword-belt was plaited from palm fronds, he wore palm-frond sandals on his feet, and his forehead looked like the calloused knee of a camel stallion. He orated:3 (Said to be the last oration that ʿAlī delivered standing, before he was struck the death blow, in Kufa, in 40/661. Ḥ 10:112. Possibly a Friday sermon, based on Nawf’s mention of “the next Friday” in §1.180.7. “His forehead looked like the calloused knee of a camel stallion” from long prostrations in prayer.)
Praise God, to whom all creation arrives, and all affairs return! We praise him for his great blessings, his lucent proof, and his abundant favor and bounty. We praise him to repay his due, render him thanks, draw closer to his reward, and deserve more of his beautiful favors. We ask his aid, hoping for his favor, wishing for his profit, trusting in his protection, acknowledging his gift, and submitting to him with deed and word. We believe in him, placing our hopes in him with certainty, turning to him as believers, bowing to him in submission, proclaiming his unity with sincerity, glorifying his greatness, and seeking his protection through our hopes and efforts.
Never begotten, he has no partner in might, never begetting, he has no heir, for he will never die.1(Reference to Qurʾan, Ikhlāṣ 112:3.) Time and age have not preceded him, increase and decrease have not affected him. Rather, he appeared before our intellects through the signs he showed us of his perfect planning and his irrevocable decree. Among the testaments of his creation is the creation of the skies, anchored without columns and standing without supports. He called out to them, and they answered, obedient and submissive, neither hesitant nor slow. If not for their acknowledgment of his sovereignty and their submission to him in obedience, he would not have made them the home for his throne, the habitation of his angels, or the place to which the pure word and the pious deed ascends from his creation.2(Modified quote of Qurʾan, Fāṭir 35:10.)
He made its stars waymarks through which those lost in the myriad valleys of the earth’s provinces are guided. The darkening of the dusky night does not veil their glow, and the swathes of intense black do not block the gleam of the moon from spreading in the skies. Glory to the one from whom nothing is hidden! Not the black- ness of spreading obscurity or tranquil night in the earth’s low regions and its rust-colored mountain ranges, not the crash of thunder in the sky’s far horizons and the momentary brilliance of lightning bolts in the clouds, not the falling of a leaf that is then blown away by stormy winds and pouring skies! He knows where each raindrop falls and pools, where each ant trails and drags its food, what foodstuffs suffice the gnat, and what every female carries in her belly.
Praise God, who existed before stool, or throne, or sky, or earth, or jinn, or human. He cannot be grasped by the imagination or measured by perception. No suppliant distracts him from responding, no gift diminishes his treasures. No eye can see him, no “where” can limit him, he cannot be described as being one of a pair, he need not toil to create, he cannot be grasped with the senses, he cannot be compared to people. He spoke to Moses and showed him his majestic signs without limbs, or implements, or speech, or mouth.3(Ar. lahawāt, lit. “uvulas,” translated as “mouths.” God’s speaking to Moses is a modified quote from Qurʾan, Nisāʾ 4:164.)
If you are sincere—O you who take on the burden of describing your Lord!—then first describe the archangels Gabriel and Michael, or the legions of cherubim in the vaults of the holy heavens, who bend low in humility, whose intellects bewilderment hinders from constraining the best of creators! Only entities with forms and appendages, entities that run their course and perish when they have reached their limit, can be grasped through a description of their attributes. Understand that there is no God but he. Every darkness brightens with his light, every light darkens with his darkness.
1.181.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:
Praise be to God, recognized without being seen, and creator without toil. He created all things with his power, subjugated kings with his might, and dominated grandees with his generosity. It was he who lodged his creatures in the world, and he sent messengers to jinn and humans to lift her veils, warn of her harm, explain her ciphers, and highlight her faults, to offer lessons in her cycles of illness and health and her bounds of licit and illicit, and to show them what God has prepared for those who obey or disobey—paradise versus hellfire, honor versus shame. I offer him praise in the full measure he deserves from his creatures. «God has appointed for each thing a measure,» for each measure a timespan, and «for each timespan a prescribed end.»1(Qurʾan, Ṭalāq 65:3, Raʿd 13:38.)
1.181.2-1.181.3
Glorify God, then, in all the glories that he has shown you, for he has not concealed from you any part of his religion. He has left nothing that he likes or dislikes without setting up a shining banner and a clear sign that either forbids a thing or calls toward it. His likes for future generations are the same, and his dislikes for them are also identical, so you should know that he will not be pleased with something you do that displeased him from the generations before you, while he will also not be displeased with you for doing something that pleased him from them. You follow clear footsteps, and your speech echoes the words of men who walked before. In all this, God has provided you with enough provisions for your life in this world—he has urged you to give thanks and claimed tribute from your tongues.
God has counseled you to piety and made it the ultimate way to earn his pleasure and fulfil what he requires of his creatures. Be conscious of God, then, for you are always before his eyes, your forelocks are in his hand, and your fortunes are in his grip. If you hide something, he knows it, and if you disclose something, he writes it down. He has appointed noble guardians over you who never miss something or transcribe something in error.2(Reference to Qurʾan, Infiṭār 82:10–11.) Know that «God shows the God-conscious a way out»3(Qurʾan, Ṭalāq 65:2.) from seditions, and he grants them light after darkness and eternal life with everything their hearts desire.4(Reference to Qurʾan, Anbiyāʾ 21:102.)
He houses the pious with honor near him, in the home he has prepared for himself which is shaded by his throne, whose light is from his splendor, whose visitors are his angels, and whose companions are his messengers. Hasten to return to God, and race against your lifespans! The time is near when your hopes will be cut off, death will overtake you, and the door of repentance will be shut in your face. This morning, you are still in the place to which your deceased ancestors pleaded to be allowed to return.1 (Reference to Qurʾan, Muʾminūn 23:99–100.) You are travelers soon to leave this abode, which is not your home—you have heard the announcement to depart and the command to gather your provisions. Know that your delicate skin cannot bear the torture of the Fire and take pity on your souls, for you have seen how they crumbled when faced with the hurts of this world. You know how each of you dreads the prick of a thorn, a fall that draws blood, the heat of burning sands.
How, then, will you endure being crushed between two sheets of fire with a stone for bedmate and a devil for companion!2(Reference to Qurʾan, Baqarah 2:24, Qāf 50:23.) Don’t you know that when the angel Mālik vents his anger upon the Fire, one part devours another in terror, and when he shouts at it, its flames shoot in panic from locked door to locked door!3(Mālik is the angel in charge of hell.) O decrepit, timeworn man whose hair is flecked with white! What will you do when shackles of fire choke you and fuse with the bones of your neck, when fetters eat into the flesh of your arms? O assembly of God’s servants, fear God, fear God, while you are still sound, while you have health before illness strikes, while you have room before your straits constrict! Strive to free your necks before their release from bondage is forfeit! Keep the night-vigil, starve your bellies, make use of your feet, spend your wealth, put your bodies to work, and exert them for the benefit of your souls. Do not be stingy in this, for God has promised, «If you help God, he will help you and give you a firm foothold.»4(Qurʾan, Muḥammad 47:7.)
God has also invited you, «Who will offer God a beautiful loan of deeds, that he may multiply it for him, and give him a generous recompense?»5(Qurʾan, Ḥadīd 57:11. I have added the words “of deeds” for clarity.) God does not ask you for help out of weakness, nor for a loan because he is poor. He asks you for help while possessing «the legions of the skies and the earth», «and he is mighty and wise».6(Qurʾan, Fatḥ 48:7, Ibrāhīm 14:4.) He asks you for a loan while possessing «the treasures of the skies and the earth», and «he is rich and praised».7(Qurʾan, Munāfiqūn 63:7, Ḥajj 22:64.) In truth, he wishes to «put you to the test, to see who among you performs the best of deeds».8(Qurʾan, Hūd 11:7.)
Hasten to perform good deeds, then, and you shall be among God’s neighbors in his abode, with his messengers for companions, his angels for visitors, your ears protected from the Fire’s frightening roar, and your bodies safe from fatigue or weakness.9(Reference to Qurʾan, Nisāʾ 4:69, Fāṭir 35:35.) «That is God’s bounty, which he bestows on whom he wills—great is God’s bounty!»10(Qurʾan, Jumʿah 62:4; Ḥadīd 57:21.) I say what you hear and ask God’s aid against my passions and yours. He suffices us and he is the best trustee.1(Modified quote from Qurʾan, Āl ʿImrān 3:173.)
1.183.1
From an oration by ʿAlī:3(Hārūnī (Taysīr, 273) places § 1.183.1 in Kufa, sometime during his caliphate 35–40/656–661, at the beginning of an oration he calls The Radiant Oration (Gharrāʾ; Raḍī calls § 1.80 in the present volume by that name).)
Praise God! Senses do not grasp him, places do not hold him, eyes do not see him, and veils do not hide him. He proves his antiquity by the newness of his creatures. By the newness of his creatures, he proves his existence, and by their similarities, he proves that he has no peer. He is true to his promise, rises above any wrong to his servants, upholds equity among his creatures, and is just when he commands. The newness of all things testifies to his eternity, the incapacity he has marked them with testifies to his power, and the annihilation he has subjugated them to testifies to his permanence. He is one without number, permanent without end, standing without need of support.
The mind receives him without touching him, all that we see testifies to his existence without entering his presence. The imagination cannot encompass him: rather, he shows his light to it and in it, while he renders himself inaccessible to it and by it, and he also summons it for judgment to it. He possesses greatness, but not in the sense of flexible perimeters that make him massive in body. He possesses might, but not in the sense of expanding limits that make him grand in form. Rather, he is great in majesty and mighty in power.
1.183.2-1.184.5
From the same oration, describing the wondrous creation of many species of animals:
Had they contemplated the greatness of his power and the vastness of his bounty, they would have returned to the Path, and feared the punishment of the Fire. But hearts are sickly and eyes diseased. Do they not observe the smallest of things he has created, how he has perfected its creation, refined its form, provided orifices for hearing and sight, and fashioned bones and skin? Observe the ant in its tiny frame and delicate shape! It can hardly be spotted by the eye or grasped by the mind, yet see how it crawls on the earth and guards its food, transporting a single seed to its nest and stashing it in its lair! It gathers in the hot season for the cold, in the time of abundance for the time of dearth, its sustenance is guaranteed, and its provisions are made to suit.
The Great Benefactor does not ignore it and the Great Rewarder does not deprive it, even when it lives on dry rock and barren stone. And if you were to contemplate the tracts through which its food passes inside its parts, high and low, the membranes of its stomach within its abdomen, and all that its head contains, eyes, ears, and everything else, you would marvel at its creation and be hard pressed to describe it. Exalted be the one who righted it upon its legs and set it on its limbs! No partner assisted him to make it, no power helped him in its creation! And if you were to follow the path of your thought to its log ical end, you would infer that the maker of the ant is also the maker of the honeybee.1(Ar. naḥlah; Or, per mss M “the date-palm (nakhlah).”) Every creature has subtle particulars, and every living being has imperceptible variances, but with regard to their being created, the large, the slight, the heavy, the light, the strong, the weak, all are the same—all are God’s creatures.
The case of sky, air, wind, and water is similar. Observe the sun, moon, plants, trees, water, and rocks. Observe the alternation of night and day, the roiling of the seas, the majesty of the mountains, the loftiness of the massifs, the diversity of languages, and the variety of tongues. Woe to those who deny the Great Ordainer, who reject the Great Planner! They claim they are like plants without a cultivator, that there is no artisan who crafted their different forms, but they have no proof for their claim and no justification for their belief. Can there ever be a building without a builder, an act without an actor?2(Lit. “Can there be a crime without a perpetrator?”; my translation is in the generic sense of action, following Ḥ 13:65.)
If you wish, I can also speak of the locust. God gave it two red eyes and within them he suspended two pupils, two moon-like orbs. He fashioned for it minute ears and an opening for a mouth, gave it keen senses, two fang-like teeth with which to cut, and two scythe-like forelegs with which to grip. Farmers dread their ravages—even if they join forces, they can’t drive the locusts away until they’ve inflicted their violence on the crops and satisfied their hunger, yet all the while each one measures no more than a tiny finger! Blessed is he before whom «all who are in the skies and the earth, obedient or unwilling,»1(Qurʾan, Raʿd 13:15.) fall prostrate!
They press their cheeks and faces to the earth, throw down their weapons in a vulnerable plea for amnesty, and offer their reins to him in awe and fear! The birds are also subject to his command. He reckons the number of their feathers and their breaths, keeps their feet firm on wet land and dry, ordains their food, and knows their innumerable species. This one is a crow, that an eagle, this one a pigeon, that an ostrich. He calls each bird by its name, and he guarantees its sustenance. Quickening heavy clouds,2(Modified quote from Qurʾan, Raʿd 13:12.) drawing forth pouring rain, and enumerating appointed bounties, he drenches the land after it was parched and prompts it to germinate after it was barren.
From an oration by ʿAlī on God’s oneness that brings together principles of knowledge like no other:
Those who assign him a form have not acknowledged his oneness, those who liken him have not hit upon his reality, those who compare him have not denoted him, those who point to him or imagine him have not directed themselves to him. Each entity that is known in its essence is constructed, and each entity that stands with another’s support is a result. God acts without implements, he ordains without thought, he is wealthy without acquisition. Time does not accompany him, and appendages do not attend him. His being precedes time, his existence precedes non-existence, and his eternity precedes the beginning. By his forming of the senses, we know that he has no senses, by his creation of opposites, we know that he has no rival, by his design of similarities, we know that he has no peer. He made light the opposite of darkness, clarity the opposite of gloom, dry the opposite of wet, and heat the opposite of cold.
He joined what was disparate, gathered what was distinct, brought close the things that were far, and separated those that were near. He cannot be confined by a limit or reckoned by counting, for instruments can only limit other instruments, and implements can only indicate similar things. “Since” prevents them from antiquity, “just” precludes them from eternity, and “if not for” drives them from perfection.1(Ar. mundhu, qad, and law-lā. These words distinguish creatures from the creator, to whom none of these terms apply, for they imply coming into existence, being newly created, and imperfection.)
Through these things, the artisan who crafted them displays his light to intellects, yet because of these things, it is impossible for eyes to see him. Stillness and motion do not apply to him. How can something he set forth apply to him? How can something he originated become part of him? How can something he made happen, happen to him? If that were the case, his being would have contrasting modes, his essence would be divided into parts, and it would be impossible for his reality to be eternal. If he had a front, he would also have a back, if he were incomplete, he would need completing, and if that were the case, the mark of craftsmanship would appear in him. He would become a sign instead of something to which all signs point. But—through the utter impossibility of that being the case—nothing that affects his creatures affects God.
He is the one who never changes, never ceases, never sets. He has not begotten, else he himself would be like one born, he was not begotten, else he would be constrained.2(Reference to Qurʾan, Ikhlāṣ 112:3.)
His glory precludes begetting sons, his purity precludes intimacy with women. The imagination cannot attain or measure him, the intellect cannot imagine or picture him, our senses cannot grasp or sense him, our hands cannot touch or feel him. No situation causes him to change, no conditions cause him to alter. The passage of night and day do not cause him to decay, light and dark do not cause him to transform. He cannot be described as possessing parts, or limbs and organs, or segments, or accidental qualities that can change, or the trait of being other than something, or comprised of sections. It cannot be said of him that he has limit, end, termination, conclusion, or that things control him so as to raise or lower him, or that things carry him so as to balance him or cause him to incline. He neither enters into things nor exits them.
He informs without tongue or mouth. He hears without ears or any other organ. He speaks without uttering, remembers without memorizing, and wills without pondering. He loves and is pleased without sentiment, he hates and is angry without toil. For anything whose being he wills, he says «“Be!”— and it is,»3( Qurʾan, Baqarah 2:117.) without emitting a sound that strikes the ear, or a call that can be heard. Rather, his speaking of words is itself an act that he created and formed. His words did not exist before, for if they had been present from antiquity, they would have constituted a second god. It cannot be said of him that he came into being after non-existence, or else the attributes of newly created beings would apply to him, there would be no difference then between him and them, nor would he possess any distinction over them. The craftsman and his craft would become the same, the initiator and the initiated would become equal.
He created his creation without using an earlier model, without seeking help from any of his creatures. Forming the earth, he held it firm without labor, anchored it without a seabed, erected it without supports, raised it without pillars, ensured it was safe from bending and buckling, and secured it from disintegration and rupture. He then set down its stakes, established its barriers, released its wellsprings, and furrowed its valleys. What he built never becomes unstable, what he strengthened never becomes weak. He is powerful over it through his authority and glory, he is concealed within it through his knowledge and recognition, he is lofty above all things through his magnificence and might. Nothing that he seeks eludes him, nothing can stand up against him or overpower him, no creature can outrun or outstrip him, he needs no wealthy benefactor to sustain him. All things bow to him and efface themselves before his majesty. No one can flee his power or be free of his benefit or harm. He has no equal to match him, no peer to rival him.
He will annihilate the world after its existence, until everything that existed in it will be lost. But the annihilation of the world after its creation is no more marvelous than its origination and formation. How could it not be so? For if all the world’s living beings came together—its birds and its beasts, all its cattle in stables and pastures, all its many species in terms of their origins and types, the dullards among its nations and the clever—if they all came together to try to create a gnat, they could not, they would never find a way to bring it into existence. Their minds would be dazed by the attempt to know how, their faculties would be perplexed and incapacitated and would retreat, beaten and weary, recognizing defeat, conceding their incapacity to bring it into existence, and acknowledging that they are too weak even to cause its destruction.
God will once again be alone after the annihilation of this world— nothing else will exist with him. As he was before its beginning, so will he be after its end, beyond season, place, moment, or time. Lifespans and seasons will become non-existent, years and hours will cease. Nothing will remain save the one, the vanquisher, to whom all affairs return. The beginning of their creation took place without their volition, their annihilation too will come without them having the power to arrest its march. If they had been able to, they would have existed forever.
Crafting any part of what he crafted caused him no hardship. Creating what he created, what he formed, caused him no fatigue. He did not bring his creatures into being in order to consolidate his authority, or from fear of cessation or loss, or to bolster his worth against a wealthier peer, or to protect himself from an avenging enemy, or to expand his kingdom, or to boast of greater riches to a partner, or out of loneliness such that he wanted the comfort of their company. Now, after bringing the world into being, he will annihilate it, but not because he is wearied by planning and running it, or to seek rest, or because any of it weighs him down.
Its long existence does not tire him and require him to annihilate it swiftly. He has planned it through his grace, upheld it with his command, and perfected it with his power. After annihilating it, he will bring it back again. This, too, without hav- ing a need for it, without seeking help from any creature to create it, or to emerge from a state of loneliness to a state of comfort, or from a state of ignorance and blindness to knowledge and attainment, or from poverty and destitution to wealth and abundance, or from shame and abjectness to might and power.
1.188-1.189
Take refuge, people, in consciousness of God, for its rope has a strong grip, and its refuge is on an impregnable height. Hasten to prepare for the engulfing pangs of death, make ready before it arrives. Know that the resurrection is the final end—enough counsel for the perceptive, enough lesson for the ignorant! But even before you arrive at that terminus, you know well what you will encounter: the narrow confines of earth-filled graves, the sheer abyss of despair, the terror of the prospect, the disintegration of ribs, the blocking of ears, the darkness of the tomb, the fear of the portent, and the horror of that crypt sealed with slabs of stone! Fear him, servants of God, fear him! The world, as is her wont, is sweeping you along, your rope tethered to her last hour, whose heralds are here and whose dawn glimmers.
The hour has already stood you in readiness to meet it on its concourse. It will arrive any moment now. Imagine that its earthquakes are already here, as though its brutish chest is already crushing out your breath, as though the world has already cut her ties with you, her children, and hurled you from her lap! Indeed, your world is like a day that has already passed, and a month that has already ended, the new in her has worn out, the healthy are wasted and thin. All in her proceed to an assembly that is tight and narrow, to matters that are grave and dark. Ahead lies a fire of rabid thirst, whose roar is deafening, whose flames rise high, whose crackle rages, whose conflagration is fierce and slow to extinguish, whose inferno blazes, whose threat is terrifying, whose pit is unfathomable, whose sides are dark, whose cauldrons are iron-hot, and everything about it is horrific. But «those who were conscious of their Lord will be led in groups into paradise»,1(Qurʾan, Zumar 39:73.) secure from punishment, safe from reprimand, snatched from the clutches of hellfire.
Paradise will delight in their arrival, and they will rejoice in their new dwelling, their permanent home. These are people whose deeds in this world were righteous, whose eyes were full of tears, whose nights were spent as daylight hours in humble entreaty to God for forgiveness, whose days were spent as nighttime vigils in alienation and separation from the world. God rewarded them with paradise—«and they were worthy of it and deserving!»2(Qurʾan, Fatḥ 48:26.) —with life in the eternal kingdom, in everlasting bliss. Servants of God, stay the course whose fulfilment will lead you to triumph, but whose squandering will hand you defeat.
Outrace your lifespans with good deeds, for you remain mortgaged to your past actions and will be rewarded for what you advance. The time that you dread is almost upon you, when no return to the world can be availed, no fall can be averted. May God help us to obey him and his Messenger! May he forgive us with his kind mercy!
People, stand fast in your land and be patient in the face of trial. Don’t follow your hot tongues with drawn swords, don’t rush into something that God has not urged you to. Know that if one of you dies in his bed, if he has recognized the right of his Lord, his Messenger, and the Messenger’s family, he dies a martyr, and God guarantees his recompense. He has earned reward for his pious intention, and that intention is equal to him unsheathing his sword. Know that everything has a time and a term.
From an oration by ʿAlī: Praise God, whose praise is pervasive, whose armies are victorious, whose greatness is exalted. I offer thanks for his multiplied blessings and immense favors: his clemency is vast, and he pardoned; he was just in all he ordained; he knows all that will happen and all that already has, he originated all creatures by his knowledge, he conceived them all through his wisdom—no imitation or instruction, no emulation of prior artisan, no mistake made, no advisors present.
1.190-1.190.2
From an oration by ʿAlī known as Qāṣiʿah—“The Crusher.” It is a long oration, containing censure of Iblīs,3(Iblīs refers to Lucifer.) and of arrogance and tribal factionalism.4(The oration was delivered in (a) Kufa in 38/658 during the episode with Muʿāwiyah’s envoy Ibn al-Ḥaḍramī in Basra (see note at § 2.29), with ʿAlī rebuking his followers, particularly certain individuals from the Tamīm and Azd tribes for bickering among themselves when they had a common enemy to fight (Thaqafī, Ghārāṭ, 2:394–396); or (b) sometime in the last few months of ʿAlī’s caliphate, after the Battle of Nahrawān when there was tribal strife in Kufa, condemned in the oration (B 736; Ḥ 13:167–168, 198).
The context of internal quarreling among ʿAlī’s followers is a possible reason for the name assigned to the oration: Qāṣiʿah, “The Crusher,” from: (1) qaṣaʿa l-qamlah, “he crushed the louse,” i.e., the oration crushed Satan and his supporters; (2) qaṣaʿat al-nāqah, “the camel crushed its grain,” referring to a camel chewing cud, because ʿAlī rode out to the tribes and delivered this oration from the back of his camel; or (3) qaṣaʿa l-māʾu ʿaṭashahu, “the water slaked his thirst,” i.e., the oration breaks the false pride of those who heed its teachings (B 736; Ḥ 13:128; F 354).)
Praise God, who donned robes of might and pride, reserving them for himself and allowing them to no other, who made them a fortress and sanctuary that only he inhabits, selecting them for his own majesty and cursing all who attempt to challenge him for them. Then he tested his cherubim to see who were humble and who arrogant. He said—while knowing all that was concealed in their hearts and their hidden secrets—«I shall create a human out of clay; when I have fashioned him in good proportion and breathed into him my spirit, bow before him in prostration. The angels prostrated, every one of them, except Iblīs»1(Qurʾan, Ṣād 38:71–74.) —his pride prevented him, and he claimed superiority over Adam, citing his loftier creation and higher origin. Iblīs—God’s enemy—is leader of the bigots and forebear of the arrogant, the one who laid the foundations of factionalism. He challenged God for his robe of haughtiness, donned garments of self-glorification and cast off the veil of humility.
Do you not see how God diminished him because of his arrogance and debased him because of his pride? He banished him in this world and prepared for him a blazing fire in the hereafter! If the Almighty had wished to create Adam from light whose radiance dazzled the eye and whose brilliance stupefied the mind, and from fragrance whose perfume filled the senses, he would have done so; and had he done so, necks would have bowed to Adam in servility, and the trial of the angels would have had little weight. But God tests his creation through things whose reality they do not know, in order to differentiate them through their choices, dispel their arrogance, and repulse their vanity.
Learn a lesson from God’s punishment of Iblīs, whose long-standing worship and painstaking efforts he obliterated for a single hour of pride! Iblīs had worshipped God for six thousand years, either by the reckoning of years in this world or by the unknown reckoning of the hereafter. Who, then, is safe from God’s retribution if he disobeys God as Iblīs did? No one! God will never allow a human to enter the celestial garden if he has committed a crime for which he evicted an angel.
God’s judgment among the inhabitants of the heavens and the inhabitants of the earth is one and the same. He will show no leniency in allowing anyone to enter a fortress he has forbidden to all the worlds.
Beware lest Iblīs infect you with his disease or intimidate you with his cavalry and infantry.2( Modified quote from Qurʾan, Isrāʾ 17:64.) By my life, he has fitted the arrow of threat to his longbow, pulled the bowstring, aimed, and shot at you from close by. «He said: My Lord, because you caused me to stray, I shall place temptations before them on earth and lead them all astray.»3(Qurʾan, Ḥijr 15:39.) His was a farfetched idea and a wild supposition, but zealotry’s offspring, factionalism’s brothers, and men riding horses of pride and intolerance made his aspiration come true.
Then the hidden secret turned into an open affair, when the recalcitrant among you became docile enough for him to lead, and his ambitions for you took firm hold. His power over you grew oppressive and he marched against you with his armies. They forced you into caverns of humiliation, hurled you into chasms of carnage, and trampled you causing terrible wounds, thrusting spears into your eyes, slashing your throats, smashing your noses, slashing your organs, and dragging you by the nose-rings of subjugation toward the Fire. Iblīs has maimed your religion and scorched your worldly affairs far more effectively than the people you took as adversaries and against whom you gathered your armies. Draw your swords against him and double your efforts in his face!
By my life, he has boasted that his origin is better than yours, he has slandered your ancestors, and tarnished your lineage. He has attacked you with his cavalry and assaulted you with his infantry. They hunt you down wherever you hide and slice off each of your fingers,1(Modified quote from Qurʾan, Anfāl 8:12.) while you cannot defend yourself through any stratagem or push back with any act of resolve. You are caught in the abyss of degradation, the nose-ring of compulsion, the arena of death, and the circle of affliction. Extinguish the fires of factionalism that lie concealed in your hearts and the resentments that belong to the Age of Ignorance!
Factionalist zeal in a Muslim comes from Satan’s incitements, from his goads, provocations, and splutterings. Resolve to adorn your head with modesty, trample self-glory beneath your feet, and cast the yoke of arrogance from your necks. Make humility the garrison that stands between you and your enemy, Iblīs, and his armies, for he has armies, infantry, cavalry, and spies in all nations. Don’t be like Cain, who thought himself better than his brother, with no superior God-given virtue except the glory he attributed to himself, generated by hate and envy, and the supercilious zeal of his heart, kindled by the fire of anger!2(Lit. “Don’t be like the one who …” The reference is to Adam’s sons Cain (Ar. Qābīl) and Abel (Ar. Hābīl), to Cain’s killing of Abel at Iblīs’s suggestion, and later, when it was too late, feeling remorse. Qurʾan, Māʾidah 5:27–31; Ḥ 13:145–146; B 747; F 358–359.) Satan breathed his own pride into Cain’s nose.3(The nose symbolizes pride in Arab culture, in addition to being the organ of breathing.) Because of that pride, God bequeathed him eternal remorse, and will hold him responsible for the crimes of all who kill until the day of resurrection.
1.190.7
Iblīs felt himself superior to Adam because of his origin, and he defamed Adam’s mode of creation when he said, “My origin is fire, while yours is clay.” Scions of wealthy nations who were given enormous riches felt themselves superior because they had become used to luxury, and they said, «We have more wealth and more children; we shall never have to endure suffering.»1(Qurʾan, Sabaʾ 34:35.)
If you must feel superior, then save your pride for the noble qualities, praiseworthy acts, and beautiful deeds that the honorable and courageous Arabian clans and tribal chieftains strived for through their cultivation of desirable traits, great minds, kingly thoughts, and praiseworthy deeds.2(“Chieftains,” lit. “queen bees” ( yaʿāsīb, sing. yaʿsūb).)
Their zeal was for traits that earn praise—protection of neighbors, fulfillment of pledges, obeying good, desisting from pride, embrace of virtue, refraining from treachery, deeming killing to be a grave affair, dispensing of justice to all, suppression of anger, and abstention from wreaking havoc on earth.
1.191
From an oration by ʿAlī: It is reported that one of ʿAlī’s companions, a man named Hammām, who was devoted to worship, said to him, “Commander of the Faithful, describe to me the pious, such that I see them before my eyes!” ʿAlī hesitated, then answered, “Hammām, be pious and do good, for «God is with those who are pious and do good.»”1(Qurʾan, Naḥl 16:128.)
Hammām was not satisfied with this brief answer and persisted. The narrator continues that ʿAlī then thanked God, praised him, invoked blessings on the Prophet, and delivered the following oration:2(Presumably in Kufa, during ʿAlī’s caliphate 35–40/656–661, based on the context given by Ibn Ṭalḥah (Maṭālib, 269), in which a few individuals approached ʿAlī asking for a favor, presumably money; they would have been more likely to petition ʿAlī when he, as caliph, was in charge of the treasury. Ibn Ṭalḥah further narrates that they identified themselves as his followers, to which ʿAlī replied, “I don’t see any signs of my true followers in you.”
At this time, Hammām asked ʿAlī to explain the signs of his true followers (shīʿah, rather than “the pious, muttaqūn,” as per the present volume), and ʿAlī responded with the oration at hand. On this text, see Qutbuddin, “Piety and Virtue in Early Islam: Two Sermons by Imam Ali,” and Qutbuddin, “Classical Islamic Oration’s Art, Function, and Life-Altering Power of Persuasion: The Ultimate Response by Hammam to Ali’s Sermon on Piety, and by Hurr to Husayn’s Battle Oration in Karbala.” Hammām (d. ca. 36/656), according to the commentators, is Hammām ibn Shurayḥ ibn Yazīd (Ḥ 10:134), or Hammām ibn ʿUbādah ibn Khuthaym (B 599).)
When God created people, he created them not needing their obedience, and untouched by their disobedience. The disobedience of those who disobey does not harm him, and the obedience of those who obey does not benefit him. He distributed sustenance among them and gave them various stations in this life.
1.192
From an oration by ʿAlī in which he describes the hypocrites who feign faith:
We praise God for having guided us toward obedience and guarded us from disobedience. We ask him to perfect his blessings and help us hold fast to his rope.
1.193 (2x)
From an oration by ʿAlī: Praise God! He has revealed traces of his authority and the magnificence of his majesty—their mighty wonders dazzle the intellect’s eyes and prevent the soul’s flashing thoughts from plumbing the depths of his attributes. I testify with belief, certainty, sincerity, and humility that there is no god but God.
Servants of God! Know that God has not created you in jest, nor cut you loose without direction. He knows the extent of his blessings and keeps track of his bounties, so ask him to grant you victory and success, seek his favors and generosity. No veil separates you from his favors, nor is any door to him closed. He is present in every place, in each time and moment, with every human and jinn. Generosity does not deplete his possessions, charity does not decrease them, supplicants do not use them up, and gifts do not drain their depths. One person does not divert his attention from another, nor does one voice distract him from another. But giving also does not prevent him from taking away. Anger does not preoccupy him from mercy, nor does mercy confound him from punishing. The visible does not block him from the hidden, nor does the hidden separate him from the visible. He is close yet distant, transcendent yet near, manifest yet hidden, hidden yet open, and close yet utterly beyond reach. He did not create the world through artifice, nor did fatigue ever prompt him to solicit help.
1.196.1-1.196.2
From an oration by ʿAlī:
He knows the bellowing of beasts in the forest, the sins his servants commit in private, the movements of fish in the deep oceans, and the crashing of waters tossed by stormy winds. I testify that Muḥammad is God’s noble representative, the ambassador who conveyed his revelation, and the messenger who brought his mercy. And now to the matter at hand: I counsel you to be conscious of God, who created you in the beginning, to whom you shall return. With him lies your petition’s success, in him rests your hopes’ realization. Your path leads to him, in him you will find protection.
Consciousness of God is the remedy for your sick hearts, the bringer of sight to your blind spirits, the cure for your diseased bodies, the healing for your corrupt breasts, the purification of your begrimed souls, the luster for your impaired eyes, the safeguard for your fearful minds, and the light for your black darkness. Wear it as an undergarment, not just as an outer robe, wear it next to your skin, not simply as an undergarment. Make it the essence that penetrates your ribs, the commander who governs your affairs, the waterhole where you drink, the advocate for your petition, the shield that will protect you on the day of dread, the lamp in the hollow of your grave, the comforter during your long, lonely suffering, and the air that helps you breathe during the anguish of your battles.
Obedience to God is an amulet that protects against encroaching dangers, looming perils, and blazing fires. Whoever is conscious of God finds troubles retreat after having approached, concerns sweeten after bitterness, waves recede after whipping up, hardships ease after exhaustion, generosity flow after drought, mercy come forward after having fled, favors gush out after draining away, and blessings pour down after scanty rain. Be conscious of God—he aided you with his guidance, counselled you with his message, and blessed you with his favors. Devote yourselves to his worship and discharge your duties of obedience to him.
Islam is God’s religion that he chose for himself and fashioned in front of his eyes.1(Reference to Qurʾan, Ṭāhā 20:39.)
He bestowed it upon the best of his creation,2(The Shiʿi commentators interpret “the best of his creation” (khayrata/khiyarata khalqihi) as Muḥammad and his descendants (B 617; R 2:301–302), the Sunni commentators as (2) all Muslims (Ḥ 10:192).) and raised its pillars upon his love. He humbled all religions by honoring it, lowered all nations by elevating it, shamed all enemies by giving it renown, chastened all challengers by giving it victory, razed error’s columns by erecting its column, slaked the thirsty from its pools, and filled these pools through its watercarriers’ efforts.
He has made it such that its handle will never break, its links will never separate, its foundations will never be destroyed, its pillars will never cease to stand, its tree will never be uprooted, its time will never end, its ways will never be effaced, its branches will never be chopped, its paths will never become narrow, its ease will never change to harshness, its dawn will never dim, its straightness will never twist, its shaft will never warp, its canyon will never become rutted, its lamps will never be extinguished, and its sweetness will never turn bitter. It is built with columns whose bases are embedded in truth and whose pediments are strong, it has wellsprings whose water gushes, lamps whose flames rise high, beacons by which travelers are guided, waymarks by which mountain passes are indicated, and watering places where thirst is slaked.
God is pleased with his religion.3(Reference to Qurʾan, Māʾidah 5:3, Āl ʿImrān 3:19.)He has made it the pinnacle of his pillars and the summit of obedience. It stands before God, column compact, edifice exalted, proof shining, fires burning, power mighty, and beacon raised, impossible to destroy.1(Ar. muʿwiz al-mathār; translation based on Ḥ 10:193; R 2:303; or “difficult to excavate,” referring to the treasures of its wisdom, based on B 619.) So honor it, follow it, give it its due, and accord it the position it deserves.
1.197
The sins that God’s servants commit at night or by day are not concealed from him. His awareness of them is total, his knowledge encompasses them fully: your limbs are his witnesses,7(Reference to Qurʾan, Nūr 24:24.) your bodies are his armies, your hearts are his spies, and your private conversations are open to him.
1.209-1.211
From an oration by ʿAlī:
Through his supreme power and sublime and wondrous craftsmanship, God produced dry, solid earth from the raging, crashing, ocean masses.1 (I have inserted the word “earth,” following Ḥ 11:52; B 640; R 2:336–337.)
He then divided the firmament into layers and separated its mass into seven skies that held together through his command and stood at the limit he had set. The skies were borne by the aquamarine depths, and those vast seas that submitted to his command bowed in reverence and stilled their flow in awe. He formed the earth’s rocky crags and towering ridges and peaks, anchoring and embedding them in the seabed until their summits rose high in the firmament and their roots sank deep below the water’s surface. He elevated the mountains above its plains and sank its supports into the backs of its far-reaching regions and land- marks, summits lofty and pinnacles high, columns for the earth fixed inside it like pegs.
The earth became still. It no longer heaved or tossed around its inhabitants, nor sank under their weight, nor shifted position. Glory to him who stopped its movement after its waters had surged in billows, who made it dry and solid after its regions had been covered in water! He made it a cradle for his creatures and unfurled it like a carpet. He settled it on still ocean depths that do not surge, a quiet sea that does not flow, though it is whipped by blustery winds, and churned by tempestuous clouds. «There is a lesson here for all who venerate God.»1(Qurʾan, Nāziʿāt 79:26.)
From an oration by ʿAlī:2(Presumably in Kufa, between 37/658 and 40/661. B 640: “This is an excerpt from an oration with which ʿAlī frequently urged his associates to muster against the Syrians, delivered after most of them held back from supporting him in the fight.”)
God! I ask you, O greatest witness, to bear witness over any of your servants who hear my words—words that are always just, never tyrannical, always righteous, never corrupt—and, after hearing them, refuses to support you and holds back from fighting for your religion. I ask all whom you have housed upon your earth and in your skies to bear witness over him. And God, I know that you will suffice me without his support and hold him accountable for his sin.
From an oration by ʿAlī: Praise God—exalted beyond comparisons to created beings, greater than the utterances of those who describe, manifest through his wondrous planning to beholders, concealed in his majestic might from thinkers, all-knowing without acquisition, increase, or learning, ordainer of all affairs without reflection or thought. Darkness does not cover him, lights do not illumine him, nights do not torment him, and days do not fatigue him. His perception does not stem from vision, his knowledge does not stem from reports.
1.213
From a supplication by ʿAlī:
Praise God who brought me to this morning alive and healthy with no leprosy in my veins,1(Ar. sūʾ, lit. “with my veins being hit with evil,” translation based on Ḥ 11:85, who says that “evil” was a euphemism for “leprosy” (baraṣ).) not seized for my worst deeds, or with my line of descendants severed, or an apostate from my religion, or a denier of my Lord, or estranged from my faith, or with my mind confused, or punished with the punishment meted out to nations before me. God! I have come into this morning your servant and bondsman, one who has oppressed his own soul. You have established your case against me, while I have no case to offer you. I can take nothing except what you give me, I can protect myself against nothing except what you protect me against. God! I seek refuge in you! Let me not be poor when you possess riches.
Let me not stray when you are the guide. Let me not be assaulted in the domain of your authority. Let me not be persecuted when you are the one who commands. God! Of all the precious faculties I possess, let my spirit be the first thing you wrest from me. Of all the blessings you have given me in trust, let it be the first deposit you ask to be returned. God! We seek refuge in you! Do not let us forsake your word or be lured away from your religion. Do not let our pas- sions rush us headlong into evil, rather than being led by the guidance that has come from you.
1.220.2
This, when the earth convulses at the blast of the trumpet, when the resurrection with its great calamities arrives, when all followers are given over to the rites they followed, all worshippers are given over to the deities they worshipped, and all who obeyed are given over to those they obeyed. That day, in the realm of God’s fairness and justice, every glance of an eye, every tread of a foot, will be requited with its due. How many arguments will be refuted on that day, how many trailing excuses will be severed! Follow a course, then, that will support your account and prove your claim. Take pro- visions that will remain for you, from this place in which you will not remain. Prepare for your journey. Seek the rain-giving lightning of salvation. Saddle the steeds of readiness.
1.224
From a supplication by ʿAlī:
God! You are the greatest comforter for those who love you, the readiest care- giver for those who trust you. You see their minds, view their thoughts, and know the strength of their perceptions, their secrets are open to you, and their hearts long for you. When loneliness makes them fearful, your remembrance gives them comfort, when calamities rain down, they seek refuge in your protection. They know that your hand holds the reins of all things, that your decree steers the course of all events. God, whenever I falter in asking, whenever I stray from my goal, guide me to my advantage and lead my heart to the right path, for that is not alien to your way of guidance or new to your way of care. God, mount me on the steed of your forgiveness, do not mount me on the steed of your justice.
2.15
ʿAlī would offer this supplication whenever he met his enemy on the battlefield:3(Prayer at Ṣiffīn, 37/657, and elsewhere, intoned when mounting his horse for battle. Minqarī, Waqʿat Ṣiffīn, 231. Full version of ʿAlī’s battlefield supplication in B 796.)
God, it is to you that our hearts flow, our necks stretch, our eyes are raised, and our feet move. It is from the swiftness of our journey to you that our bodies have become emaciated.1(Lit. “It is to you that bodies become emaciated (unḍiyat).” I have inserted, “from swift journeying,” based on the literary context, which evokes a journey in which the rider pushes his camel to swift and continuous travel, thereby emaciating it—in our text, the emaciated camel signifies the rider himself.)
God, buried rancor has surfaced today, and cauldrons of malice simmer. God, we complain to you of our Prophet’s death, our enemies’ numbers, and our community’s implosion. «Lord, decide between us and our tribesmen with truth, for you are the best conqueror.»2 (Qurʾan, Aʿrāf 7:89.)
2.30
From ʿAlī’s letter to Muʿāwiyah:1(Excerpt from a letter—presumably from Kufa, and, since there is no reference to a prior battle, before the Battle of Ṣiffīn in 37/657—in reply to a letter by Muʿāwiyah containing threats and accusations. Earlier part of ʿAlī’s letter recorded in B 825; Ḥ 16:7–8.)
Fear God in all that you do and reflect on what you owe him. Return to the path of obedience, for your ignorance of it will not be excused. Its waymarks are clear, its roads are bright, its thoroughfare is open, and its destination is the one you should seek. The intelligent traverse it to reach water, while the wretched turn away. Whoever deviates from it strays from the truth and is lost in the waterless desert—God overturns his blessings and afflicts him with harsh punishment.
Works Cited
Nahj al-Balāghah: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ʿAlī: A Parallel English-Arabic Text. Vol. 15. Brill, 2024.
