Bediuzzaman Said Nursi was born in eastern Turkey in 1877 and died in 1960 at the age of eightythree after a life of exemplary struggle and selfsacrifice in the cause of Islam. He was a scholar of the highest standing having studied not only all the traditional religious sciences but also modern science and had earned the name Bediuzzaman, Wonder of the Age, in his youth as a result of his outstanding ability and learning.

Bediuzzaman’s lifetime spanned the final decades of the Caliphate and Ottoman Empire, its collapse and dismemberment after the First World War, and, after its formation in 1923, the first thirtyseven years of the Republic, of which the years up to 1950 are famous for the government’s repressive anti-Islamic and anti-religious policies.

Until the years following the First World War, Bediuzzaman’s struggles in the cause of Islam had been active and in the public domain. He had not only taught many students and had engaged in debate and discussion with leading scholars from all over the Islamic world, but he had also commanded and led in person a