Introduction

This slim book consists of a series of extracts in translation from the most important piece of religious literature to appear in Turkey in modern times, the Risale-i Nur (The Treatise of Light) of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi.

Said Nursi lived between the years 1877 and 1960. He was widely versed in the sciences of both East and West, and was able to solve the most complex problems. Thus it was that he was given the name of Bediuzzaman (Wonder of the Age). He deemed the most severe disease afflict­ing man in the present age in his search for true happiness to be weakness of belief in God, and diagnosed the source of this disease as being the tendency to regard the modem sciences and religious science as separate and irreconcilable entities. Since man is, in reality, a being com­posed of both matter and spirit, to consider exis­tence from the viewpoint of only one of this pair  can yield no result other than an intensification of the crisis into which man has fallen.

Moreover, knowledge of modern science pro­duces effects and results already in this world, while the fruits of religious science are to be enjoyed mostly in the Hereafter; this fact, together with the marvels of modern science, has resulted in a preponderance of knowledge of that kind in the rationally-inclined West. Unfortunately, mod­em science has remained totaly incapable of find­ing a remedy for the spiritual wounds of mankind, despite all its brilliance.

Confronted by this situation, as a man of science appreciating the necessity for a reconcilia­tion between religion and modern science, Bediuzzaman examined the foundations of faith in a fashion suited to the mind of the age and in so doing produced the six-thousand-page work known as the Risale-i Nur.

Belief in God and the other pillars of belief and religion are examined in his works in a manner different to that employed by other religious scholars. When Bediuzzaman answered the schoolboys who complained that their teachers were not mentioning God to them by telling them to heed the sciences they studied, rather than the teachers who taught them (page 51), he was in fact summarizing the whole significance of his writings in a single sentence. He thus gave great importance to making the matters discussed in the Risale-i Nur comprehensible to every class of peo-

ple, and hence employed the most simple examples when clarifying even the subtle and profound questions of faith.

Students of the Risale-i Nur have undertaken the task of translating the Risale-i Nur into English, and the present book, in 1975 the first to be published, is in the form of an anthology of extracts and was offered as a first sampling. The present edition has been revised with additions. The translators have striven to reproduce the sense of style of the original as closely as pos­sible, and ask their readers to bear in mind that the spirit and the structure of the Ottoman Turkish in which the works are written may differ from what they are accustomed to.

From God is success, and upon Him is our reliance.