Al-Sharif al-Radi

Al-Sharif al-Radi (Abu al-Hasan Muhammad ibn al-Husayn al-Musawi, 359 AH / 969–70 CE – 406 AH / 1015 CE) was a Baghdadi scholar, poet, and Twelver Shia sayyid descended from the Imams through Musa al-Kazim, who studied under al-Shaykh al-Mufid. He is best known as the compiler of Nahj al-Balagha ("The Path of Eloquence"), an anthology of sermons, letters, and aphorisms attributed to ʿAli ibn Abi Talib; in Twelver tradition ʿAli is the first Imam, while in the broader Sunni framing he is the fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. He also left a celebrated Diwan of Arabic poetry and the work Khasais al-Aimma on the distinctive qualities of the Imams. The attribution of every passage in Nahj al-Balagha to ʿAli has been debated by later scholars, and the collection is read as al-Radi's editorial compilation rather than a single authored text.