The Words (Risale-i Nur Collection)
Istanbul · 2013
S
Said Nursi
Said Nursi
1877 CE–1960 CE · Bitlis
Said Nursi (also called Bediuzzaman, "Wonder of the Age") was a Kurdish-Turkish Sunni Muslim scholar and the author of the Risale-i Nur ("Treatise of Light"), a sprawling Qur'an-centred commentary running to thousands of pages. He was born around 1877 (some academic sources give 1878) in the Kurdish village of Nurs, in the Hizan district of Bitlis in eastern Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. After an intensive traditional madrasa (Islamic seminary) education, he spent years in Van under a provincial governor's patronage, where he also took up modern sciences and conceived a never-completed plan for a combined religious-and-scientific university. In 1911 he preached a noted sermon at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. During the First World War he served as a chaplain to Ottoman militia, was wounded and taken prisoner by Russian forces, and was held at Kostroma before returning in 1918. Nursi himself divided his life into an "Old Said" of political engagement and a "New Said" of withdrawal into faith-centred writing. Under the new secular Turkish Republic he spent more than two decades in internal exile and prison, most productively in the village of Barla, while followers copied and circulated his treatises by hand. He criticised the 1925 Sheikh Said rebellion yet was repeatedly suspected because of the similar name. He died on 23 March 1960 in Urfa. The movement inspired by his writings became one of modern Turkey's most influential religious currents.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →
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Stop 1 of 111888–1896Studying
Bitlis
What they did here
Received his madrasa (Islamic seminary) education across towns of the Bitlis-Siirt region in eastern Anatolia. Accounts of prodigious early mastery (e.g. completing many books in months, earning the title Bediuzzaman, 'Wonder of the Age') come largely from later Nur-movement hagiography rather than independent records; the broad fact of an eastern-Anatolian seminary training is sound, the specific feats are traditional.
About Bitlis
Bitlis, in the mountains of eastern Anatolia (modern Turkey) west of Lake Van, was a Kurdish town of the region. The reformer Said Nursi (d. 1960) was active in the Bitlis area in his early career; it was near Bitlis that he was wounded and captured by Russian forces in 1916, beginning his years as a prisoner of war.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Said Nursi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.