Outreaches of Religious Service

Chapter 1 Outreaches of Religious Service

Backstage at the opening of the 2010 Said Nursi Symposium, an electronic screen repeatedly flashed a sentence declaring that, until his death, the mis- sion of Said Nursi was “to save the faith” (imanı kurtarmak).1 Today’s adherents of the Nur movement, including people at Suffa, claim that Nursi wrote the Risale-i Nur to counter the materialist and positivist ideologies that had spread in the late Ottoman Empire by reconciling the idea of faith with that of reason and modern science.2 For this reason, they believe that Nursi was a renewer of Islam (müceddit), one of those Muslim guides who appear on the Earth once every century to refresh the Islamic message in accordance with the changing social, cultural, and historical conditions.3 Accordingly, Nursi came into this world to reinterpret revelation in line with scientific discourse and save religion from the intellectual torpor into which it had fallen in the previous two centuries. Discontent with the state of Islam in late Ottoman times, he at- tacked both the old class of the scholars of Islam (ulema) and the Sufi leaders (şeyh), holding them responsible for the dire situation of Islam at that time. While he deplored the former for their collusion with state power and their inability to renew their teachings in terms of method and approach, he ac- cused the latter of remaining attached to elitist disciplinary paths that were inaccessible to the vast majority of ordinary Muslims or, in the worst hypoth- esis, of supporting idolatry.4

1 The Said Nursi Symposium is an international meeting organized by a group of Nur founda- tions every year in which Muslim scholars from Turkey and other countries are invited to discuss topics related to Nursi’s thought. The title of the 2010 Symposium was “The Risale-i Nur: Knowledge, Faith, Morality and the Future of Humankind.” 2 The word Nur that denotes the movement is particularly fitting to refer to both the rational- ist/enlightening and Islamic/ethical dimensions which are intertwined in Said Nursi’s views. Usually translated as “light” in Islamic circles in Turkey, nur also carries the meaning of “spir- it,” intended as a sort of flash of inspiration that has both intellectual and spiritual connota- tions. Instead, adherents of the Nur movement deny that the term might refer either to Said Nursi himself or to the name of his village of origin in Eastern Anatolia, as some have claimed. 3 See Algar (2001). For the tradition of müceddit (in Arabic, mujaddid, “renewer [of the century]”) in Islam, see Donzel (2011). 4 The conformity to Islam of some practices of devotion usually associated with Sufism, such as the cult of the saints and of their tombs, has been a long-debated issue by both orthodox and Sufi scholars since the times of Ibn Taymiyyah in the thirteenth century (Rahman 1979 [1966]). However, Sufism has been particularly questioned since the end of the nineteenth century following the impact of Western ideas and techniques of governance, with their

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Sami abi, a thirty-year-old brother with a degree in psychology who was at the head of the Suffa foundation’s office in the Edirnekapı neighborhood in Istanbul, expressed the situation that Said Nursi had to cope with in the late Ottoman Empire with the following words:

At that time ignorance was widespread even among the Sufi leaders, scholars of Islam and masters (hoca). For example, they quoted one say- ing of the Prophet (hadith) to claim that the Earth was flat and had water flooding underneath. […] But this hadit was müteşabih, that is, it used a simile to explain something. In the West, science (bilim) emerged from a strong clash with religion. For centuries knowledge had been in the Church’s hands, and the Church also controlled education. It was not a coincidence that the greatest men of knowledge were also believers. […] Yet [in Christianity] there was this solipsistic theory about the Earth and the idea that the world was flat. When people like Copernicus started to refute these theses, there was a clash and science and religion took two separate paths. Then the European states developed until they came knocking at the Ottoman Empire’s door… And when the sultan talked with European scientists he made a big mistake: he told them that the Earth was flat. So they laughed in his face and thought that Islam must be the same as Christianity. Then, such ideas diffused in the country and people started thinking: ‘We don’t need religion anymore.’ They started to have doubts about religion. It was in this way that materialism spread, as well as propaganda against religion. […] The şeyhs, the hocas, and the ulema weren’t able to find answers to the questions posed by science nor to European thought in general. They said things like the Earth being flat… But this was ignorance (cahillik). It was not Islam. At this moment and for these reasons the üstad5 started writing the Risale-i Nur. […] His goal was to save religion (din) from the anti-religious notions that were conveyed in parallel within the sciences (fen) and philosophy (felsefe). The Risale was written to save the faith.

emphasis on reason, on the one hand, and under the pressure of Islamic reformist scholars who defended a purist version of Islam, on the other (for a critique see Ewing (1997), Sirriyeh (1999), and Weismann (2011); see also Gilsenan (2005 [1982] ff.)). For this reason, apart from Nursi, many Sufis in Turkey also acknowledged that the Sufi lodges had to reform their meth- ods to keep up with the times (Silverstein 2007). 5 Translatable into English as “master,” this is one of the terms that, together with Bediüzzaman (“wonder of the time”), people in the Nur movement use to refer respectfully to Said Nursi.