These two books, from the same publisher, exhibit many of the problems with books in English on Said Nursi in general, albeit in different ways. The book by Ian Markham and Suendam Pirim is an exercise in hagiography. The first sixty pages are an introduction to his thought and this is followed by about 120 pages of passages from his works. There is an interesting account of his life, which manages to omit the fact that he was a Kurd, and which fails to acknowledge the very significant role that the minorities have played in Turkish history, both in the past and the present. What we also get is an anodyne account of how the Ottoman rulers and the Turkish people protected and continue to protect “the richness of its ethnic diversity” (p. 6), which is perhaps the official understanding of these matters in the tourist literature, but is a strange phrase to find in an academic book about Turkey with its very varied history of treatment of ethnic and religious minorities.
The account of Said Nursi's thought and ideas is accurate, and untroubled by any possible criticism. We gain no idea of what, if anything, is original in his ideas or style, nor why his ideas were for a long time controversial in Turkey. There is no discussion of some of the more challenging elements in his voluminous writings that do not fit in neatly with the interpretation of him as a democrat and a liberal. More importantly, he comes over as boring: merely repeating what he said without considering any possible criticism, and following this with extensive quotations is not a riveting way of presenting a thinker.
The book on theodicy is a collection of essays and, as is typically the case, it is very variable in quality. I shall describe each essay briefly, and then concentrate on one in particular. The first essay by Barbara Stowasser is excellent and does orient Nursi well within the Sunni theological tradition. Ian Markham follows this by suggesting that Nursi and Bertrand Russell would not have much in common on the issue, which I doubt many would find a shocking idea, while Thomas Michel, Şükran Vahide and Bilal Kuşpınar outline Nursi's views on death. Lucinda Mosher provides a close reading of one of Nursi's shorter Arabic works, and brings out some interesting stylistic aspects of the text as well as providing a Christian reflection on it. Mark Richardson and Leo Lefebre follow this theme while Simsek produces a long and totally perplexing essay on animal pain, which seemed to me to avoid the issue throughout. Dale Eickelmann links the issue of justice with modernity, while Eric Ormsby provides an excellent comparison between Nursi and some earlier writers on theodicy, from which I am not sure Nursi emerges particularly well. Gareth Jones discusses Dante, and Sykianen justice and political reform. David Law compares Nursi with Thomas Merton, Bilal Kuspınar writes on the issue of justice and balance, while Kaplow compares Nursi with Kant on ethics in a way that displays little understanding of either thinker.
I am going to concentrate on the essay by Thomas Michel, his second in the volume, on Nursi and natural disasters. It is a very interesting topic, and it is often argued that the problem of suffering does not have much resonance in Islam. It is certainly true that this topic is taken up far more by Jewish and Christian theologians than by their Muslim peers. One can perhaps see why when one looks at the sorts of responses Nursi provides for the suffering of innocents in Islam: natural disasters are apparently a result of people not understanding properly their relationship with God, not in the sense that they are direct punishments for such a misunderstanding (although sometimes he implies this is in fact the case) but because they should just accept patiently whatever God does. Anyway, physical disasters are merely punishments for minor offences – major offences will be dealt with in the world to come. Everybody is a sinner and so it is perfectly appropriate for everyone to suffer, and in the case of those who are obviously innocent (so everyone is not a sinner, it seems) we are told that God can do anything he wants with his creation, and that suffering provides opportunities for morally uplifting behaviour and tests us. In any case, what God does is a mystery and we cannot really understand why he operates in the way he does.
At the end of his account Michel says quite rightly that many modern people will find these arguments unsuccessful – but then non-believers have just as much difficulty finding a meaning in natural disasters. This is surely wrong: non-believers have no such difficulty, and often say that natural disasters occur without having any deeper meaning at all, they are after all natural events. The strategy of asking whether you could do better is not one that should be employed lightly: one would not want to hear the question posed by a surgeon after an operation, for example. The reason we read books is because we hope the author knows more than we do, or has something interesting to tell us. Yet Nursi often seems not to have anything either very interesting or novel to say, and comparing him with a range of other thinkers brings this out quite bluntly. Why bother reading him at all, then?
This is where this collection of essays and Markham and Pirim's book fall down: they fail to explain precisely what Nursi is doing. He is not presenting arguments and ideas in the ordinary way, he is attempting to replicate the points which he thinks the Quran makes and in such a way that they will resonate with average believers, and revive their faith. There are arguments present, of course, since there are in the Quran too, and there is no reason why we should not examine them, as the Quran invites us to do, yet few of the authors in either book are prepared to do so. Nursi's ideas are produced, sometimes compared with other ideas, and then they are put away again as if nothing more could be done with them. It is true that Nursi has many supporters who use his writings as a source of spiritual inspiration and support, and they have sometimes been criticized for using them in place of the Quran itself, although in my experience this charge is misleading. His supporters, the Nurcu community, tend to use his works as an aid to understanding the Quran, which is exactly how he wants them to be used, and they are well designed for such use. But those of us who analyse the works of Nursi use them differently, we are discussing them from a logical point of view, and it is no insult to him or to his work to criticize them. On the contrary, once we add him to the canon of significant Quranic commentators we have to criticize him along with the other thinkers if he is really to be a member of the canon.
This is where both books fail to satisfy. They are in the worst sense of the word thoroughly pious. They treat their subject with such deference that they fail to engage with his ideas. It is difficult to believe, for example, that Michel would treat a Catholic thinker with the latitude that he gives Nursi on the topic of theodicy. In fact, in the Hebrew Bible God criticizes the companions of Job for producing precisely those sorts of responses to suffering which Nursi outlines, and God says that he will only forgive them if Job intercedes on their behalf! If all Nursi does is trot out these tired old platitudes then why not just treat him with a yawn and move onto a more interesting thinker? There is no discussion of Job or Ayyub in the collection on theodicy, which is remarkable given that Nursi sees it as his task to explain how Ayyub in the Quran responds to the suffering which befalls him.
Nursi is seeking to replicate the scope of the Quran, in so far as a human being can do this, and illustrate in modern terms the range and power of the Book. There is nothing wrong in exploring critically the ideas he produces, and comparing them with the points made in the Quran itself, this is precisely what his followers in Turkey and elsewhere do today. He is done a disservice when commentators treat him with such caution that they are frightened to tackle him as capable of surviving in the rough and tumble of debate and argument.
