Is the head of any family today as happy as Bediuzzaman? Is there any father who has millions of children? And what children! Is there any Ustad and Master who has raised so many students?
With divine permission, this sacred, spiritual bond will endure as long as the world exists and will pour into eternity, a flood of light. For this divine cause has crystallized from the Qur'an's ocean of light; it is born of the Qur'an and will exist together with it.
• His Compassion and Kindness
Our great Master discovered truth even in his childhood. Retiring into caves to listen to the cries of his heart and to commune with his spirit, he attained knowledge of God and the joy of the sense of His presence through worship, contemplation, and reflection.
But at that awful time when the black waves of disbelief and atheism were threatening to engulf the Islamic world as well as our country, he sprang into the arena of jihad like a lion springing up from its lair or an erupting volcano. He sacrificed ease and comfort of every sort for this sacred cause. It is because of this that from that day forward all his words were like lava, all his ideas like molten rock. They scorch the hearts on which they fall, causing emotions and ideas to burst into flame.
Our great Master resembles Imam al-Ghazzali in that he returned to guiding others and the life of society after a period of complete retirement and isolation, undergoing similar significant stages.
This suggests that Almighty God lays the duties of guidance and illumi¬nation on great guides when they have undergone a period of purification and training in seclusion. As soon as the breaths, now purer than distilled water, leave their breasts and are reflected in people's hearts, their effect is something quite other.
The victories al-Ghazzali won nine hundred years ago in the field of vir¬tue and morality, Bediuzzaman won this century in the arena of belief and sincerity.
Yes, it was always his unparalleled kindness and compassion that drove our Master to fight in this awesome jihad. Let's listen to how he describes it:
"They ask me: Why do you attack this and that? So I tell them: I wasn't aware of it. There is a great conflagration before me, the flames of which are touching the skies. My children are burning in it. My belief has caught fire too, and is burning. I am racing to put out the fire and save my belief. If someone wants to hold me up on the way, or I trip on him, what impor¬tance has it? What importance has such a minor incident in the face of that conflagration? Narrow minds! Narrow views!"
• His Self-Sufficiency and Independence
The thousands of examples of Ustad's self-sufficiency and indepen¬dence which he provided throughout his life for every level of society, are well-known to everyone. He adopted as his way of life reliance on the inex¬haustible treasury of the Lord of all the worlds, both physically and spiritu¬ally, and was completely self-sufficient in the face of all things other than God. This was not merely a habit. He always persisted in this whatever the cost.
Interestingly, this way has not remained limited to himself; he passed it on to his students as a sacred ideal. One cannot help but applaud this self-sufficiency of the Nur students, who have the honour of becoming sub¬merged in the ocean of the Risale-i Nur.
See how in the Second Letter in his masterpiece Mektübat, Ustad explains this important point in six aspects with all the nobility of belief and consciousness of knowledge:
"The First: The people of misguidance accuse religious scholars of making their learning a means of subsistence. They attack them unfairly, saying: 'They are making knowledge and religion a means of livelihood for themselves.' It is necessary to show this to be false by action.