In the Light of Said Nursi
Camilla T. Nereid
University of Bergen
Said Nursi (1873-1960), the founder of one of the most important religious movements of modern Turkey, was throughout his life faced with opposition and distrust from the Kemalist state. He was presented as a madman, a Muslim fanatic and a Kurdish nationalist. While other religious groups were persecuted when they incited revolts, the Nurcus were taken to court simply for being Nurcus. Yet Said Nursi, an early supporter of Mustafa Kemal, had come to accept many of the tenets of the new state. He only gave his own interpretation to such concepts of secularism, seeing it as the state’s withdrawal from the religious arena, rather than a change to religion itself. He did, however, reject the concept of nationalism, both in its Kurdish and Turkish form. This was his main intellectual challenge to the new state, and the reason his movement was targeted for harassment more than the Nak§ibendis and other religious groups who accepted the idea of a Turkish nation.
Bergen Studies on the Middle East and Africa is a series of monographs from younger scholars at the University of Bergen. Based on previously unpublished dissertations, it covers the humanities and social sciences, with an emphasis on Islamic Africa and the Near East. | 
