In His Name, be He glorified!
My Dear Brothers!
I was given one of the Old Said's printed works, I took a curious and careful look at it. The following piece was imparted to my heart, which, if appropriate, may be added to the end of the Letters (Mektûbat).
Firstly: For twenty to thirty years I had been searching for a copy of Münâzarat, but had been unable to find one. It was printed forty‑one years ago by the Ebüzziya Press and consists of lessons I gave in the third year of the Second Constitutional Period to the Ertuş tribe, and particularly the Kudan and Mamhuran. My intention was to explain constitutional government as prescribed by the Shari'a to the tribes thoroughly, and to induce them to accept it. Recently, someone found a copy and sent it to me. I took the head of the Old Said and studied it attentively with the inspirations of the New Said. I understood that with a strange premonition, the Old Said felt the material and non-material events that would happen now, thirty to forty years later. Behind the veil of the nomadic Kurdish tribes, he as though saw the irreligious truly backward and treacherous true reactionaries of the present, who mask themselves with a veil of civilization and patriotism and who drive this nation back to pre-Islamic customs, and was speaking with them and striking them on the head.
Secondly: I read carefully from pages 105 to 109 of the printed work, and it seemed as though there was some sort of saint among the tribes I was instructing at that time by means of question and answer. I was unaware of it. At that point, he objected strongly, saying:
“You're exaggerating! You see the imaginary as real, and you're insulting us. These are the end times, everything is going to get gradually worse.”
It says the following in the book:
“Why should the world be the world of progress for everyone else and the world of decline and retrogression for us? Is that the case? See, I'm not going to speak to you, I'm turning this way; I shall speak to the people of the future: “O you Saids, Hamzas, Ömers, Osmans, Tahirs, Yusufs, Ahmeds and the rest of you who are hidden behind the high age of three centuries hence, and listening silently to my words, watch us with a secret, unseen gaze! I am addressing you! Raise your heads and say: 'You are right!' And it should be incumbent on you to say it. Let these contemporaries of mine not listen if they do not wish. I am speaking to you over the wireless telegraph that stretches from the valleys of the past called history to your elevated future. What should I do? I was hasty, I came in winter, but you will come in a paradise‑like spring. The seeds of light sown now will open as flowers in your ground. And we await this from you as the recompense for our service that when you come to go to the past, pass by my grave, and place a few of those gifts of spring by the citadel of Van, which is the gravestone of my medrese and houses my bones, and is the custodian of the Horhor's earth.”
That is to say, as it says in the Thirteenth Hope of the Treatise for the Elderly, …. and the death of my medrese, which had flourished and been the gathering‑place of friends and was the preparatory school for the Medresetü'z-Zehrâ, indicated the vastness of the immaterial corpse of all the medreses in Anatolia, which had been abolished and died; the great monolith of Van's citadel had become a gravestone to all of them. O you who are to come three hundred years hence, plant the flower of a Nur School on the summit of the citadel! That is to say, construct a physical Medresetü'z‑Zehrâ, which has not yet been resurrected bodily but lives in the spirit extensively and populously. In any event, the Old Said lived mostly following the dream of that medrese, and from pages 147 to 157, the printed work explains the founding and vital advantages of the Medresetü' z-Zehrâ.
It is an auspicious sign that on the collapse of the ghastly twenty‑five- year despotism which killed the medreses, the Education Minister, Tevfik, decided on the construction of a Medresetü'z-Zehrâ in Van called the University of the East, and beyond all hope in the midst of pressing affairs, the President, Celâl, even, shared Tevfik's views. This indicates that the Old Said's predictions and hopes of forty years will be realized.
Here, three truths will be explained, to elucidate the answer of forty‑five years ago.
The First: With a premonition, the Old Said perceived two strange events, but they needed interpreting like true dreams. Just as if something black or white is beheld through a red filter, it appears red; so he beheld the truth of the matter through the filter of Islamic politics, and it altered it to a degree. The lofty saint who was present saw the error and objected violently in the way explained. There are two parts to the truth of it:
The First: He used to say that a brilliant light would appear in the Ottoman lands, and even before the proclamation of the constitution he many times told this to his students in order to console theme He said too that in the face of all the evils they were witnessing, it would bring happiness to this country. Forty years later, the Risale‑i Nur demonstrates this truth to eyes that are blind even.
Not considering the Risale‑i Nur's narrow field quantitatively, but perceiving the vast benefits it would yield in regard to quality and reality, and looking from the point of view of politics, he spoke of it as occurring throughout the Ottoman lands. The lofty saint objected because [Said] conceived of its narrow field being extensive. He was right, but the Old Said was also right. For since the Risale-i Nur saves belief, that narrow field saves through belief, everlasting, eternal life, and a million of its students become like a thousand million. That is to say, to try to secure not a million, but a thousand people's eternal life is more valuable and in effect more extensive than working for a thousand million people's transient worldly life and civilization, With his premonition resembling a true dream, the Old Said envisaged the narrow field embracing all the Ottoman lands. God willing, with the seeds sown by the Risale-i Nur sprouting in a hundred years time, the broad field will be the Risale-i Nur's and his former view will show that his misinterpretation of it was in fact correct.
The Second Truth: Forty years ago, as written in the Old Said's works and in the Statement of Purpose at the beginning of Signs of Miraculousness, Said used to say to his students insistently and repeatedly that there was going to be a tremendous upheaval in both society and humanity that would be both material and moral and spiritual. He would say that his giving up the world and going into seclusion and remaining unmarried would be envied. In fact, when Shaykh Bakhit, one of the leading ulema of al‑Azhar University, came to Istanbul in the first year of the Second Constitutional Period, he asked the Old Said:
What have you got to say about the Ottoman constitutional government and European civilization?
Said replied:
The Ottomans are pregnant with a European state and will give birth to it one day, while Europe is pregnant with Islam and one day will give birth to an Islamic state.
The learned Shaykh Bakhit concurred with this and said to the scholars accompanying him: “I can't argue with this man and defeat him!”
We have witnessed the first birth with our own eyes; in a quarter of a century Turkey is further from religion than Europe.
God willing, the second birth with occur in twenty to thirty years. There are numerous signs in both East and West that an Islamic state will emerge in Europe.
The Third Truth: The Old Said repeatedly predicted due to the premonition both he and the New Said had, that there would be a momentous event, both material and spiritual, and a huge, vastly destructive upheaval in the Ottoman lands. But contrarily to the matter of the Risale‑i Nur, he saw the extremely broad field to be narrow. As time and the Second World War confirm, he interpreted as follows the broad field he saw in the Ottoman lands:
It is a fact that the destruction wrought on humanity by the Second World War was enormous, but, since it concerned worldly life and transitory civilization, it was less than that wrought on the Ottomans. Since the upheaval the Ottomans met with was destruction that damaged everlasting life and eternal happiness and was an upheaval of Islam, its significance was more terrible than the Second World War, and corrects that error of the Old Said, interprets his true dream, and demonstrates the premonition almost visibly. Apparently, the saint there was right, but in truth, it proves that those perceptions of the Old Said were more correct, and rebuffs the saint's objections.
Saîd Nursî