Sources of religious knowledge from Nahj al-Balagha’s perspective

Since Nahj al-Balagha is at the height of eloquence and rhetoric after the Qur’an and includes of highly sublime religious teachings, Therefore, the subject “Sources of Religious Knowledge from the Perspective of Nahj al-Balagheh” has been studied in this thesis which has been done in a descriptive-analytical method. Looking at the background of this issue, it can be concluded that the subject (sources of religious knowledge) has been studied from the perspective of the Holy Quran and the traditions, but has not been independently studied from Nahj al-Balagha’s perspective. In this dissertation, we will discuss the topics that help to explain this subject. Key topics such as: Knowledge and its possibility in the field of religious issues, tradition from the point of view of the word, its term and its application in the process of jurisprudential issues, its authority and its place in the context of jurisprudential issues, revelation in its lexical and idiomatic expressions and its rationality from the perspective of Nahjah. Al-Balagha, as well as reason, its realm and its ability to discover religious revelatory truths and doctrines and its authenticity, the reason for the rational argument in explaining religious doctrine.  And the harmony of reason with the Shari’a in the inference of religious law is one of the issues that have been discussed in this paper as the outlines and tools of knowledge in the field of religious epistemology in the lexicon of Nahj al-Balagha.  From the perspective of Imam Ali (PBUH), revelation is the most important and the most dangerous instrument of knowledge.That honorable authority in Nahj al-Balagha refers to the Sunnah as the right way through which the Sunnah is the Messenger of God, not the way of the unjust predecessors. In the words of Imam Ali (as), the intellect is an expensive gem that guides one to acquire religious knowledge and truths.