Translation from Arabic into English of Hazrat Ali’s famous letter of instructions addressed as Khalif to the then Governor of Egypt Malik Ashtar.
Hazrat Ali, the Great Khalif of Islam and the first in the line of the imamate, apart from his abiding contribution to spiritual thought, is known to the Arabic world as a great jurist and man of letters. According to the historian Masudi (Murooj-uz-Zahab Masudi Vol. II, P.33. Egypt), Hazrat Ali is credited with not less than 480 treatises, lectures and epistles on a variety of subjects dealing with philosophy, religion, law and politics, as collected by Zaid Ibn Wahab in the Imam’s own life time. So highly valued are these contributions both for their contents and their intrinsic literary worth that some of his master pieces, throughout the course of Islamic history, have become subjects of study in centres of Muslim learning. Indeed, his reputation seems to have travelled into Europe at the time of the Renaissance, for, we find that Edward Powcock, (1604-1691) a professor at the University of Oxford, published the first English translation of his ‘Sayings’ and delivered in 1639 a series of lectures on his ‘Rhetoric’.
Click here to read: http://www.fja.gov.pk/conduct.htm
http://www.amaana.org/ismaali.html
Also read United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Ismailimail 