Second Station of the Shining Proof
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate
And from Him do we seek help
One of the truths contained in the last verse of Sura al‑Fatiha, which indicates the comparison of the people of guidance and the straight path and the people of misguidance and rebellion, and is the source of all the comparisons in the Risale‑i Nur, is expressed also in wondrous and miraculous fashion by the verse of Sura al‑Nur: Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His light is as if there were a niche and within it a lamp; the lamp enclosed in glass; the glass as it were a brilliant star; lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well‑nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah guides whom He will to His Light; Allah sets forth parables for men; and Allah knows all things. and a subsequent verse: Or [the unbelievers’ state] is like the depths of darkness in a vast deep ocean, overwhelmed with billow topped by billow, topped by [dark] clouds…(to the end of the verse)
It is proved in the First Ray that the first verse above, the Light Verse, contains ten allusions to the Risale‑i Nur; it miraculously foretells that Qur’anic commentary. This was the main reason the name Nur (light) was given to the Risale‑i Nur. In a comparison in a section of the Twenty‑Ninth Letter describing a journey of the imagination, a semantic miracle (bir mânevî mu’cize) in the word Nur in this extraordinary verse – resembling the miracle in the Nūn of Na‘budu – is elucidated. It led the traveller in The Supreme Sign (Âyetü’l‑Kübra) to question the whole universe and every sort of being in order to seek, find, and learn about his Creator. He came to know Him through thirty‑three ways and cogent proofs with the certainty of knowledge and the vision of certainty. The untiring, insatiable traveller journeyed too with his mind, heart, and imagination through the centuries and the levels of the heavens and earth, and seeing and inspecting the whole world as a city, he mounted his reason sometimes on the wisdom of the Qur’an, sometimes on philosophy, and gazing at the most distant levels through the powerful telescope of imagination, he saw reality as it is, and in part informed us of it in The Supreme Sign.
Now, of those many worlds and levels he entered on his journey of the imagination, which was a sort of analogy or comparison and was completely in conformity with reality, we shall explain by way of example only three levels, extremely concisely, in order to illustrate the comparison at the end of Sura al‑Fatiha. However, this will be only from the point of view of the power of reason. We refer you to the Risale‑i Nur for the other observations and comparisons.