An Intertextual Approach to the Symbol of Social Ethics in Nahjul Balagha and Sahifa Imam

The social ethics of government officials is something that has been covered in Nahjul Balagha and in many other works inspired by this book. From among the contemporary works, Sahifa Noor by Imam Khomeini contains recommendations for the state officials on observing the codes of social ethics. Intertextuality is a new approach in human science studies that places texts in a network of meaningful relations so that each text, on one hand, is taken from another text and on the other hand, it is reflected in the next texts. A survey of the evolutionary course of this method leads to the Arabic-Persian theory of intertextuality in which the relations between the present and absent texts are divided in three general categories of intentionally explicit, intentionally implicit and implied. There are other subclasses such as adaptation, analysis, translation, allusion, aspiration, … This paper intends to study Arabic-Persian intertextuality of Nahjul Balagha in Imam Khomeini’s Sahifa Noor on the social ethics of state officials. More contemplation when studying the two works will show maximum frequency on intentionally explicit intertextual relations in terms of analysis and then implied relations in terms of allusion.