In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate
All benedictions are due to the Pre‑Eternal Sovereign, Eternally All-Wise, the Undying Most-Merciful, Who has honoured us with Islam and guided us with the Illustrious Shari‘a to the straight path.
Such a Shari‘a that reason and transmitted knowledge have united to affirm the veracity of its truths.
Such truths that being firmly rooted in the ground of reality, their boughs and branches rise spreading to the skies of perfection.
Such branches that they yield the fruits of happiness in this world and the next. And He has guided us through the Inimitable Qur’an;
Such a Book that having disclosed through its principles the precise, profound, divine laws inscribed by the hand of destiny and pen of wisdom in the book of the world’s creation, and are in force in it, it has become the absolute guarantor through its just injunctions of mankind’s order, balance, and progress, and is its universal master.
Endless blessings be bestowed upon the Prince of the Universe and Glory of the World to whose messengership the world with all its realms and their beings testified, and to whose miracles it bore witness, and announced the lofty wares he brought from the treasury of the unseen.
As though on coming into the world, each realm applauded him in its own tongue. The Pre‑Eternal Monarch, plucking the strings of the heavens and the earth so that each with a different tongue hymned the strains of his miracles, caused the empyrean to ring out with the sweet sound. And so it will for all eternity. As though the skies uttered felicitations with the heavenly tongues of the angels and moons and his own ascension; and the earth lauded his miracles with the tongues of its stones, trees, and animals; and the atmosphere gave the glad tidings of his prophethood through the signs of the jinns and the shady clouds; and the past betokened through the prognostications of the prophets and soothsayers the dawn of that sun of truth; and the present, that is, the Era of Bliss, held up as witness to his prophethood the mighty revolution that occurred in the character of the Arabs and the almost instantaneous emergence of absolute civilisation out of absolute primitivity; and the future welcomed his propitious arrival through its events and the stages of its precise sciences, and offered thanks with its wise tongue for his guidance; and humankind proclaimed through its seekers after truth, and particularly through the articulate tongue of Muhammad (UWBP) himself, being a proof of himself, that he had come from the Truth; and the All-Glorious One recited through the eloquent tongue of His Qur’an the decree of the Unlettered Prophet’s messengership. And so they do all recite and declaim it.
Verse:
All the lions of the world are bound to this chain;
How could the fox chew through it by cunning?
To Proceed: this wretched, strange Nursi, who although he deserves to be called the Oddity of the Age became known as the Wonder of the Age (Bediuzzaman), cries out in extreme pain at the nation’s decline, alas and alack! For abandoning the essence and kernel of Islam, we fixed our gazes on its exterior and shell. And due to misunderstandings and ill manners, we did not afford Islam its right nor pay it the respect it was due. So in disgust it swathed itself in clouds of illusion and delusion, and concealed itself.
And it had the right, for we mixed israiliyyat with the fundamentals of belief, and stories with the tenets of faith, and metaphors with the truths of belief, and did not appreciate its value. So to punish us in this world, it left us in abasement and penury. And what will save us, is again its mercy.
O Muslim brothers! We shall offer it an apology. Together we shall declare our loyalty and pay it allegiance. We shall grasp hold of its strong rope.
Also, I declare fearlessly that what has stirred me up and given me the courage to contest the ideas of past centuries, and to defend against the imaginings and misapprehensions that have gained strength through the strategies of hundreds of years, is my certain conviction that
truth will sprout and grow, although it is concealed in the earth; and its partisans and supporters will be triumphant, although they may be weak and few in number due to the inclemency of time and place.
It is also my belief that it shall be the reality of Islam (hakikat‑ı İslamiye) which will prevail over the future and be absolute ruler in every continent. It is Islam that will conquer them; the signs of this are to be seen.
For in the past, eight obstacles prevented the Illustrious Shari‘a vanquishing completely the bigotry and blind imitation of tent‑dwellers in their far-flung privation, and the embellished trivia and despotism of house-dwellers in the lands of ignorance. But now they have been routed by three truths, or are being routed.
The obstacles obstructing the Europeans were their blind imitation, ignorance, and bigotry, and the authority of their priests;
while those obstructing us were various forms of despotism, immorality, our confused circumstances, and despair, which leads to idleness. These obstacles caused the steady eclipsing of the sun of Islam.
The eighth, and principal, obstacle and chief calamity is this: together with the Europeans we deludedly imagined (tevehhüm) there to be a clash and contradiction between some of the apparent matters of Islam (zevâhir‑i İslamiyet) and some questions of science.
Bravo to the abounding efforts of education and science (fünun)! For they have decked us out with the desire to search for the truth, love of humanity, and the tendency to be fair, and have overturned those obstacles and got rid of them, and are so doing.
Yes, the chief reason we have been deprived of the comforts of this world and the Europeans have been deprived of the happiness of the next and the sun of Islam has been eclipsed, is the misunderstanding and groundless idea of the clash and conflict between Islam and science.
How strange! How can a slave hostilely oppose his master, or a servant his lord, or a child his father? For Islam is the master and guide of the sciences (fünun), and the chief and father of all true knowledge (ulûm).
But regrettably, the above misapprehension and false idea has prevailed up to the present, and with its doubts has caused despair and closed up the door of civilisation and learning (ma’arif) to the Kurds and their likes. For imagining some of the apparent matters of religion to be opposed to some questions of science, they shied away from them. For instance, the sphericity of the earth, the very first step of geography, is the most elementary matter of science. But because they supposed this self‑evident matter to be contrary to the six matters to be discussed later, they did not hold back from arrogantly challenging it.
O you who is scrutinizing this book of mine! Know that the service I want to perform with it is this:
by demonstrating the straight path of Islam, I want both to repel the doubts of those inimical to religion – who go to one extreme – and to throw their doubts in their faces; and to repulse the misapprehensions of the literalists (zâhirperest) and those who go to the other extreme and deserve the epithet ‘fatuous friends’ and to show their false notions to be baseless. I want too to help and support the genuine scholars of Islam, and the intelligent and loyal, who guide to the truth and pave the way leading to Islam’s good fortune and future, striving with complete certainty of victory.
In Short: My aim is to polish that diamond sword.
If You Ask: What is this anxiety of yours? And what need is there to provide proofs (bürhan) for knowledge that is axiomatic? For to advance proofs for questions that have become self‑evident through the admixture of ideas and discoveries of the empirical sciences, is to announce what is known.
By Way of Answer I Say This: Regretably, although all those who share with me this slice of time are apparently the children of the thirteenth century, they are in respect of ideas and progress, relics of the Middle Ages. It is as if our contemporaries are the index of the centuries from the end of the third to the thirteenth, or are samples of them, or are a hybrid people. In fact, many self‑evident matters of the present, are deemed by them to be delusions.