thousand three hundred years – having grown through the meeting of minds and the expansion of their results – could not be found in a single person even in civilized places and among clever people. So whoever decks out his conscience with fairness will confirm that the Shari‘a is always beyond human power, and was particularly so at that time. And he will endorse the statement “you haven’t been able to do it and you won’t be able to.”
Now understand that the conclusion of the above arguments is that firstly you should bear in mind the following rules: one person cannot be a specialist in a plethora of sciences; the same speech or words differ [when uttered by] two [different] people; [when uttered by] one they will be gold, and [when spoken by] the other they will be coal; the sciences result from
The famous historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was actually Scottish. He was born in Scotland and died in London. The two passages cited here are taken from his work On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London: 1841), the chapter entitled: The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam. It is not known what Nursi’s source was, for the first is rather a loose translation (See, pp. 74-5). Carlyle was actually praising the moral discipline and direction that Islam, and its Prophet, gives its adherents while at the same time not denying the pleasant things of life. It is not clear which remarks are his and which are Goethe’s. The second (pp. 64-5), is closer to the original, though there it is Islam that swallowed up the existing religions, not the Qur’an.