Examining Positive and Negative Emotions in Nahj al-Balāgha: A Case Study of the Conceptual Group “Women”

Abstract

This study explores positive and negative emotions in Nahj al-Balāgha to deepen understanding of Imam ʿAlī’s influential personality and the intellectual and value-based structures of his era. It also addresses the contested issue of women’s relationship to religion and culture, focusing on Imam ʿAlī’s perspective, which has been widely debated, especially in modern times. Avoiding preconceived judgments, the research employs a linguistic and psychological approach. It begins with a general survey of satisfaction and dissatisfaction categories in Nahj al-Balāgha, followed by a case analysis of the conceptual group “women” to reveal embedded psychological and social layers. Using historical psychology, deep-learning technology, and natural-language-processing algorithms, the study applies a “Contextualized Construct Representation” method to reconstruct links between common linguistic usage and the text’s structures. Through transfer-learning techniques, the text was analyzed and classified based on Arabic literary corpora, without human intervention, using Watson’s Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scales (PANAS). Results indicate that negative emotional scores in Imam ʿAlī’s speech slightly exceed positive ones, though a relative balance is maintained. His dissatisfaction regarding women relates to contingent or essential qualities and must be interpreted within the historical, social, and cultural context of his time. Therefore, Nahj al-Balāgha should not be seen as a complete reflection of Imam ʿAlī’s full worldview on women. In Sermon 80, which discusses women’s deficiencies, the “nervous” dimension scored high, while the “Afraid” sub-dimension scored low, suggesting a statistically significant, realistic, and tension-free attitude in describing women.