The Misogynous Statements in Nahj ul-Balāgha: A Non-Confessional Analysis

The misogynous narratives that were reflected in Nahj ul-Balāgha, are typically understood as such by decontextualizing the statements and embedding them in the modern framework. Given the incongruity between the traditional statement and the feminist viewpoints of the modern era, the statements- as part of Islamic and especially, Shiite tradition- are inconsonantly compared with the modern outlooks. The present paper shows that many of those statements regarding women in Nahj ul-Balāgha are not buttressed by any reliable evidence as well as the content of those statements could  be traced in the bulk of similar statements in the literary works written after the fourth century A.H. Moreover, given the cultural circumstances of the time that  Nahj ul-Balāgha was embedded in,  those attitudes towards women are intelligible and also they were accepted and considered to be consonant with the popular mentalities wrought into the historical and literary works contemporary with compiling Nahj ul-Balāgha and those composed in the subsequent centuries. To expound this hypothesis, attempts are made to analyze the evidence, context as well as cultural mentalities about women in Nahj ul-Balāgha, and its exegeses and sundry literary and historical texts produced up to the 6th/12th century in order to compare those texts with the former. The approach is non-confessional