before their fellow Risale-i Nur Students, so that the `collective personality' necessary to fulfill the Risale-i Nur's unique functions could emerge. This consciousness of a joint or corporate personality is one of the distinguishing marks of the Risale-i Nur and its Students, and Bediuzzaman himself offered the finest example in his total sincerity and selflessness, always putting this collective personality before himself.

• Aloofness from Political Life

Bediuzzaman saw the modern world as having captured man's soul and plunged him into the life of this world and pointed out that the way to be saved from this abyss was through following the teachings of the Risale-i Nur. One aspect of this was life and the living of it. Bediuzzaman wrote that this vein had become so wounded through the conditions of life becoming burdensome due to inessential needs, wastefulness and greed that it attracted and held all the attention of the misguided, so that the least significant worldly need took preference over the greatest matter of religion. As "the dispenser of the healing remedies of the Qur'an", the Risale-i Nur "was able to withstand this strange sickness of this strange age", and "its resolute, unshakeable, constant, sincere, loyal, and self-sacrificing Students were able to resist it." So also the modem world has infected people with a senseless curiosity about "the chess-games" of politics and diplomacy, the most harmful result of which was division in society along political lines.
"While before everything the truths of belief should be the foremost aim at this time and other things remain in second, third, and fourth place, and serving them through the Risale-i Nur should be the prime duty and point of curiosity and main aim, the state of the world has stimulated to a high degree the veins of worldly life, and especially of social life, and of political life in particular, and more than anything of partisanship in regard to the World War, which is a manifestation Divine Wrath in punishment for the vice and misguidance of civilization; this inauspicious age has injected those harmful, passing desires into the very centre of the heart, even to the degree of the diamonds of the truths of belief.." Bediuzzaman continues that this age has implanted these to such a degree that they