Said Nursi and the Meaning of Life
-An Islamic Perspective-
Prof. Dr. İbrahim Özdemir
İpek University, Ankara-TURKEY
ib60dmr@gmail.com
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Introduction:
Why are we here? What is the meaning of life?
One of the most profound and fundamental questions human beings have
ever asked themselves and that has plagued reflective minds for as long as
reflective minds have existed in the universe are:

Why are we here?

How did we come to exist on this planet?

What is the meaning of life, and more importantly what is the meaning
of my life?
In fact, Socrates, (c.469–399BC) the father of philosophy in the West
proclaimed “the unexamined life is not worth living”. It is instructive that he
doesn't say that the unexamined life is "less meaningful than it could be" or
"one of many possible responses to human existence." Socrates underlined
that we are unable to grow toward greater understanding of our true nature
unless we take the time to examine and reflect upon our life and its
meaning.
The meaning of life is also a major topic and question to be solved for
religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which provide a natural
context to respond the question regarding the meaning of life. However, there
are others who hold a nihilistic and Darwinian standing and argue that God
does not exist and therefore human life is absurd and meaningless. The
latter is a modern phenomenon since the rise of atheism in 18th and 19th
centuries. Darwin's dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of
our
most
fundamental beliefs. Apparently, as Glynn points out “the
philosophical, cultural, and emotional impact of this conclusion could hardly
be overstated.” If Darwin was right, for example, the implication would be
that nothing could be sacred. Therefore, as Frankl underlines “the alleged
meaninglessness of his life threatens contemporary man” and this is “the
existential vacuum within him”.
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Interestingly, this nihilistic modern Western phenomenon began to spread
Muslim lands with the colonization of these lands by Western imperialist
powers in 19th centuries.
Moreover, in the first quarter of the 20th century a new kind of colonization,
the colonization of Muslim mind and heart, began to take place in the name
of dominant Western philosophical currents. According to Haddad, for
example, those “Western values were supported and disseminated by
colonialists, Orientalists and Christian missionaries, who attacked Islam as
a religion and portrayed it as a vestige of a Medieval mentality, responsible
for the weakened condition of the Muslims, from which they could not
recover unless they adhered to the posited Western ideologies of modernism,
secularism, socialism, materialism, liberalism, and the scientific revolution”.
These modern and secular conceptions of reality began to challenge the core
and foundational values of Muslim societies and “created a deep crisis of
identity”. One result of these identity crises was the emergence of secular
and nihilist generations in the Muslim societies.
Nihilism
When we look at “the absolute form of cosmic nihilism” for example, “it
denies to the universe any sort of intelligibility or meaning. The whole
universe, accordingly, is blank and featureless, giving no response to the
age-old human search for understanding and no support to distinctively
human aims, aspirations or purposes.” I think, it is here, where the nihilism
comes in and becomes a new way of life and denies the existence and
possibility of any value in the life. Thus, the central premise of nihilism is
that there is no need for meaning in a meaningless universe.
On this basis, “existential nihilists” contend “human existence has no
purpose, value, or justification. There is no reason to live, and yet we persist in
living. The human situation is therefore absurd.” Therefore, nihilism can be
regarded as an ultimate challenge to religions and their moral systems.
David Ray Griffin, a professor of philosophy of religion and theology, asks
this crucial question: if the universe, as the leading philosophers of
existential thought claimed, has no sense of importance. Moreover,
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everything in it is absurd, then "how could sensitive human beings make a
go of human life in this context?" That is, a universe in which there is "no
natural law, no divine purpose, no objective importance, no hierarchy of
values is inherent in nature of things, to which we should concern." As a
result of this understanding, Griffin concludes, "many people have not made
a go of it, becoming alcoholics, drug addicts, war addicts, mental patients, or
suicides".
The far-reaching implications of this modern understanding, not only for
Muslims, but also for members of all faiths were disastrous and destructive.
It began to sweep all moral, traditional and religious values in the social life.
Nursi Meaning of Life
Said Nursi (1877-1960), a religious scholar of the highest standing, I think,
was one of the first Muslim scholars who perceived and comprehended the
far-reaching implications of this new challenge. Therefore, he should be
considered as an original and powerful voice, and deserve to be heard at this
context. According Colin Turner, “Nursi stands like a colossus above twentiethcentury Muslim scholarship in Turkey is no overstatement”. Moreover, Turner
argues that “both supporters and detractors alike would no doubt agree that
Nursi is arguably the most important and influential scholar to emerge from
Turkey in the past five hundred years. (Turner, 2013, 2-3). Interestingly, he
regarded the spread of these secular, materialistic, and nihilistic views in
Muslim societies as a new kind of domination with following remarks:
The greatest danger facing the people of Islam at this
time is their hearts being corrupted and belief
harmed through the misguidance that arises from
[materialist]
science
and
philosophy.
The
sole
solution for this is light [Nur]; it is to show light so
that their hearts can be reformed and their belief,
saved.
Therefore, Nursi declared that nothing concerns him as much as the dangers
that threaten Islam. He argues that these dangers used to come from the
outside and were therefore easy to resist. “Now they come from within where
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the worms have spread throughout the body making resistance difficult. I
fear that the society is unable to withstand this disease because it does not
resemble the enemy.”
Furthermore, the far-reaching implications of this challenge felt and seen by
Nursi as a “dreadful fire,” that would sweep all religious and moral values in
human life and led people to what is called a nihilist way of life. So, the
“melancholy of modernity” and “sick culture” of the European civilization
began to spread and inflict Muslims as well. Therefore, his reaction to this
challenge was the reaction of affectionate father who tries to save his
children from a great and dreadful fire:
There is a great conflagration before me; the flames are
touching the skies. My child is burning among them; my
belief too has caught fire and is burning. I am racing to
put out the fire, to save my belief. (...)
I have sacrificed even my life in the hereafter to save the
community’s religious belief. I neither long for Paradise,
nor fear Hell. (…) I am happy to burn in the fires of Hell if
I see [the Muslims] belief to be safe, for while my body
was burning, my heart would be in bliss.
We know that Nursi was a single man and devoted his life to the ideals of
Islam. However, as we understand from the above quotation, he was
considering the whole generations of Muslim Ummah as his own children
and therefore he was moved to intense compassion and pity when he saw
that the moral and spiritual well-being of Muslim generations are in danger.
Thus, the mission of Nursi was crystal-clear for him: to re-interpret the
Qur’an and the Qur’anic teachings in a nihilist, materialist, and secular
world and demonstrate its relevance for present day. In other words, “to reinterpreted Islamic tradition in a way that lends itself to a revolutionary
meaning.”
Nursi, when trying to overcome the challenge of modern secular worldview,
devised a new method of interpreting the Qur’an. As Haddad observed, “he
placed a great deal of emphasis on the Qur'an's miraculous nature, which he
saw as central for mounting a defense of Islam as culture, in an effort to
disparage Western ideologies of positivism, materialism and secularism.”
Although it is not difficult to see the continuity of tradition in his works, he
makes it clear that his major guide and master is the Qur’an itself. This, of
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course, does not mean that he ignores his classical and spiritual masters
and his debt to them. In fact, he mentions Ghazali (d.1111), Imām Rabbānī
Shaykh Ahmad al-Farūqī al-Sirhindī (1564–1624) the great son of an India
from Punjab (1564-1624), and Mawlana Jalaluddin al-Rumi (1207-1273) as
his spiritual masters (ustad-i manawi).
A Meaningful Universe and a Meaningful Life
Nursi, considering the very teachings of the Qur'anic Weltanschauung in
contrast to nihilist and secularist world-view, presented a meaningful
universe and ethical implications of such a world-view for us.
In the
Qur'anic conception, the right answer-and the only right one-to this question
is not far to seek: the source of being is God Himself; existence is conferred
upon man by God as a gratuitous gift.
Therefore, the deepest purpose of creation is explained by a famous hadith
qudsi (a sacred saying of the Prophet not part of the Quran in which God
speaks in the first person through the mouth of the Prophet): “I was a hidden
treasure. I loved to be known. Therefore, I created the creation so that I
would be known.” The purpose of creation therefore is God’s love for the
knowledge of Himself realized through His central agent on earth, humanity.
For a human being to know God is to fulfill the purpose of creation.
Thus, there is, between God and man, a fundamental relation of creator and
creature in this part of the Qur'anic divina commedia, Allah plays the role of
the Giver of being and existence to man. He is the Creator of man, and man
is nothing but his creature. Indeed, Allah is the Creator of the whole world,
ranging from the angels above (40: 18), Jinn (55: 14), the heavens and the
earth (14:22), the sun and the moon, the day and the night (41:37), to the
mountains and the rivers (13:3, etc.), trees, fruits, grain and herbs (55:1011and all kinds of animals (24:44). There will be no end if we go on
enumerating what He has created.
In this context, the teachings of Nursi is a good example of this
understanding of universe from a Qur’anic perspective in twentieth century.
Nursi, in the tradition of great Sufi masters such İbn Arabi, Ghazali, and
Rumi, regards God as the very meaning of reality; a meaning manifested,
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and clarified and brought home by the universe, developed further by
humanity. Thus, God is the dimension that makes other dimensions possible:
He gives meaning and life to everything else. For example, the Qur'an sees in
the humble bee a recipient of Divine inspiration and constantly calls upon
the reader to observe the perpetual change of the winds, the alternation of
day and night, the clouds, the starry heavens, and the planets swimming
through infinite space!
It is obvious that the Qur'an rejects the argument that nature is meaningless
and purposeless and the resulting conclusion, that is, that human life also is
meaningless and purposeless. God says in Qur’an that "Not without purpose
did We create heaven and earth and all between! That was the thought of
Unbelievers..."(38: 27) And also He declares to humanity that He “created
not jinn and mankind except that they might worship Him”( 51:56)
Accordingly, if there is meaning and purpose in nature, then there must be
meaning and purpose in human life, too. When Nursi, for example,
interprets the verse 52:35, once more we see that he draws moral
implications from the balance, orderliness and purposefulness of the
universe and underlines that humanity cannot be meaningless.
Moreover, Nursi underlines the chief characteristics of human beings -as the
Qur'an wishes them to be- as a powerful consciousness and faith, which
forms the foundation of 'I'-ness. The psychological states gained by iman,
perform a motor function in ordering the life of the individual person and
their withstanding all sorts of difficulties.
Conclusion
Said Nursi's understanding of universe and the place of human being in it is
based on the Qur'an as a whole. Since God created the universe with a
particular order, balance, measure, beauty, and aesthetic structure, and
sustains the whole system, it forms the clearest and most decisive evidence
of its Maker. All living things are meaningful and interrelated. What is more
important, human beings cannot be meaningless, purposeless, and idle.
They are vicegerents of God and have their own responsibilities.
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Humanity's chief duty and the aim of life, he argues convincingly, is not to
live as he/she likes uncontrolled by moral principles. In contrast, humanity
should study the book of the universe in the light of the Qur'an. They will
make their lives meaningful through the inspiration and principles they
derive from these two books, i.e., the Qur’an, and the book of universe.
Moreover, the moral implications of a meaningful universe are a meaningful
life, which is exemplified by the life of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). His life
and sunnah as “models of action in most diverse areas” brings meaning into
our daily life that stretches from birth to death.