"It is not for self praise. I present my faults, excuses and apologies with the title, because Bedi' means strange. Like my style, my manner of expression and dress are strange, they are different. Through the tongue of this title, I am requesting that the opinions and customs generally held and practiced are not made the criteria for judging mine."

While in a later work he stated that he used the name "in order to make known a divine bounty." He wrote:

"I now realize that the name Bediuzzaman, which was given to me many years ago although I was not worthy of it, was not mine anyway. It was rather a name of the Risale-i Nur. It had been attached to the Risale-i Nur's apparent translator temporarily and as a trust."

Bediuzzaman had his own medrese in Van, at the foot of the citadel, called the Horhor Medrese, with sometimes as many as sixty students, and it was during his stay in Van that Bediuzzaman developed his ideas on educational reform and created his own particular method of teaching. He developed this through examining the principles of all he had studied together with his experience of teaching religious and scientific subjects, then considering them in relation to the needs of the times. The basis of this method was to `combine' the religious sciences and modern sciences, with the result that the positive sciences would corroborate and strengthen the truths of religion. Bediuzzaman now followed this method when teaching his students.

Bediuzzaman's greatest aim at this time was to establish a university in eastern Anatolia where this method would be practiced; that is, where modern science would be taught side by side with the religious sciences and his other ideas put into practice. This university he called the Medresetü'z Zehra after the el-Ezher University in Cairo, as it was to be its sister university in the centre of the eastern Islamic world. Having traveled throughout eastern