Said Nursi

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.