From the Racecourse to the Eternal Abode: The Conceptual Metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY in Nahj al-Balagha

Abstract

Objectives: The figurative language of Nahj al-Balagha—the compilation of sermons, letters, and aphorisms attributed to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661)—has been analysed extensively within the Arabic rhetorical tradition, where it is treated chiefly as stylistic istiʿāra, but rarely reconstructed as a systematic cognitive model. This paper analyses how the corpus conceptualises human existence through the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, using the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson.

Methods: Following a transparent, replicable procedure applied to journey-, travel-, and race-related expressions (mamarr, majāz, raḥīl, zād, miḍmār, sibāq, sabaqa, ghāya, dār qarār), the study reconstructs the cross-domain mappings, image-schematic structure, and ethical entailments that organise the text.

Results: It argues that journey imagery functions not as ornament but as an integrated cognitive-ethical model built on the SOURCE–PATH–GOAL schema: the world is a transient passage (dār majāz), the human being a morally accountable traveller, piety the provision (zād) for the road, death a departure rather than annihilation, and the Hereafter the permanent abode (dār qarār).

Conclusions: The text re-engineers a near-universal metaphor by adding eschatological directionality, a morally bifurcated goal, obligatory provisioning, and a force-dynamic mount image, contributing both to cognitive metaphor studies of Arabic-Islamic discourse and to the analysis of Nahj al-Balagha.