As you know, I consider the thought of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi to be one of the foremost assemblages of ideas among Islamic thinkers. Primarily, it is not possible not to see the deep human respect which comes together with Bediuzzaman's ideas. It is appropriate to continually underline this characteristic at a time when certain people display their attachment to Islam by embracing the gun. Islamic action based on the fear of death is null and void. Those who do this are answerable to Allah.
I am obliged to remain in this country since my visa for the USA has not been renewed, and therefore much as I want to I can't take part in your conference. I am sure it will be a success and request that you convey my respects and best wishes to those who attend.
When I was trying to set the story of Bediuzzaman's life within a framework which takes its inspiration from sociology, I had to speak on the telephone concerning our agreement with the State University of New York. When I got hold of the State University publishers, they asked what sort of title it would be published with. I pointed out the breadth of the subject and suggested the title, "Religion and Social Change in Turkey." It was as though the person at the other end changed lines: "Couldn't you add something to the title to do with Sufism? We could increase the possibility of sales in that way."
For years there has been a wide interest in Sufism in the USA. Besides serious interest, among other factors fanning the interest has been an 'exoticism' arising from the colorful culture of the East. Most of the time this has been the center of interest. I suddenly remembered part of one of Bediuzzaman's writings: "Among a father's advice to his son, not to be deceived by the attractive and colorful balloons they saw around them." I immediately turned down the suggestion.
I present this anecdote because I found it important both as a point on which we could focus and concentrate Bediuzzaman's ideas, and from the point of view of East-West relations. Also I would like to make clear that my words are not directed against Sufism; there are profound traces of Sufi concepts in Bediuzzaman's writings. What I want to explain are Bediuzzaman's words which point to the difference between outer appearances and 'the essence'.
On the one hand, Said Nursi dwelt on matters that social researchers study under the title of 'micro structures', and on the other he researched the effects of more comprehensive social processes. His characteristic was understanding the functions of Islam in both fields. And he studied this two-tiered approach from the point of view of the change Turkey had undergone since the Ottoman Empire.
When we say 'micro structures', what comes to mind are family relations, the ties between people at a local level; I mean not society as a bureaucratic machine, but the totality of social relations in which the human element has an important place. Ottoman culture situated human relations within an Islamic framework and established institutions peculiar to itself that would assist the emergence of human values. At the base of Bediuzzaman's profound anxieties were the blows that these structures received during the Westenization of the Ottoman Empire. What is interesting is that the feeling of emptiness which the changes within the family brought with them have been generally understood by thinkers in Turkey, but that this has not been tied to the weakening of Islamic elements.
An interesting literary work written by Resat Nuri Guntekin in the 1930' s, "Falling Leaves" (Yaprak Dokumu), shows that this problem was understood, but what sort of vacuum the problem arose from did not attract the writer' s interest.
It is not possible to deny the important successes of the Turkish Republic from the point of view of consolidating our social structure, but the Republic concentrated on subjects that we can describe as 'big'. For example, the character of the political regime, the principle of nationalism, Turkey's development. Whereas what makes people into human beings is not only their participating in great causes. A sector of life that we can call 'daily life' produces problems for most people as serious as those of these causes. The relations of parents and children, the relations between relatives whose behavior is going to be chosen as a model, how mutual assistance, solidarity, and customs which have been established to assist the formation of ties of friendship are going to be organized. The Republican regime did not put these subjects to the fore. As a result the Islamic values which circumscribe daily relations predominated in daily life, even if only implicitly. But the most important problem was the necessity that arose for change together with the changing world of established relations. With the start of the twentieth century, the rise in the literacy rate, more people actively entering society, and together with their entering it their demands increasing, forced the subject to be looked at as a mass problem.
The solution Bediuzzaman offered us is tied to understanding Islamic beliefs as being connected both to daily life and the suitability of Islam for this being solved as a mass problem. The values of Islam bring an order to daily life, but at the same time they secure the binding of people, of the modern broad masses, to one another. This tie appears in one of Bediuzzaman's views concerning the prescribed prayers. According to Said Nursi, the prayers are not only the statement of a person's belief, they are at the same time the realization of thousands of people turning in the same direction, a statement of togetherness. Thus at this point, important views of Bediuzzaman's confront us concerning structures which make numerous individuals into a collective unity, and which sociologists define as 'macro'.
I hope that in this way I have been able to demonstrate a part of Bediuzzaman's views concerning society. But besides this, Bediuzzaman's contributions to an Islamic position are to do with the nature of belief. According to Bediuzzaman, one of the things that has to be done this century is that those who understand Islam according to its essential meaning of 'submitting oneself' should benefit also from the richness of its 'understandings'. Bediuzzaman states this in many places in his writings. And this view is also a statement of the desire of contemporary man to understand his world through 'explanations'. One of the characteristics of Islam is that it does not take these 'explanations' in a fixed form, and accepts the explanations that every religiously minded person gives as being one approach among many. This is bound to believers 'striving' (jihad) through discussion and debate among themselves and reaching a common view. In a situation in which many people in the West see 'jihad' as armed struggle, I think my relating Bediuzzaman's understanding of 'jihad' in this form is not mistaken.
From all these contributions of Bediuzzaman's, I reach the conclusion that he saw the Islamic sciences as a true science for human advancement and that he presented these ideas to us. And once again I want to say here that when Cemil Meric represented Bediuzzaman's ideas to me as a totality which were new both from the social and human point of view, original to himself, and absolutely had to be studied in their entirety, he was not wrong, also to state once again my debt to him.
***
Serif Mardin
*** Professor Mardin was born in 1927, and in 1948 graduated from Stanford University, California. He then joined the Political Sciences Department as an assistant, and rose to the rank of Professor in the same university. He moved to Bogazici University in Istanbul in 1973. Professor Mardin has published numerous works and articles, translated into Turkish, such as Din ve ideoloji, and Jon Turkler, and into Japanese and other languages. He is the close relation of the late Ebu'lula Mardin. He first started doing sociological research on the subject of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi and Nurjuluk (the Risale-i Nur movement) at the suggestion of the thinker Cemil Meric, and the fruit of ten years' work in this field was Religion and Social Change in Turkey; the Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, which was published in America in December 1989. Translated into Turkish, it was published in Turkey in October 1992 under the title, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi Olayi; Modern Turkiye'de Din ve Toplumsal Degisim. Professor Mardin has lectured in Paris, London, arid America on Said Nursi and the Nurju movement. An article entitled, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, The Shaping of a Vocation, appeared in the work Religious Organization and Religious Experience (1982).'
