Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 68

ODAK

68 • Emel Taştekin
can be viewed as a unified text since it has a place in the collective consciousness of its followers as a singularly redeeming
“book.” Therefore it is curious that it remains largely ignored by
scholars of cultural and literary studies, even though Nursi’s life,
influence and Qur’anic commentary often spark sociological
and theological interests. More importantly, this text, which has
become such a wide social phenomenon in Turkey with impacts
abroad, is mostly studied by scholars who are to a great extend
sympathetic to either the text itself or the Nur movement. I argue there is great potential in reading Risale through the terms
of literary and cultural criticism as it offers a case of scriptural
interpretation encountering literary modernity that foregrounds
individual enlightenment, while at the same time, is a part of
modern book culture coinciding with the rapid spread of print
media in a modernizing Turkey. In that sense, it is not only suitable to be studied under postcolonial literary studies but also
literary theory in general in that it poses questions about the use
of literary devices in religious texts and their role in forming
and maintaining collective identities and political communities.
One of the benefits of reading Risale discursively is to
repudiate the general perception of it as a rejection of political
life1. Nursi’s political “silence” and the myths about his exilic
pacifism that followed the establishment of the secular Turkish
Republic of Kemal Ataturk, I argue, construct the radical introduction of secularism and the interruption of a religious past

Secular Trauma and Religious Myth • 69

by Westernizing governments in Turkey as a ‘cultural trauma’.
Such trauma then is used to construct a collective identity for
which the Risale serves as a foundational text. The text memorializes the repressed Muslim past and constructs a mythopoeic repository for a Muslim identity that can counter the rapid
bureaucratization of culture by the secular Republic. Risale,
therefore, provides a textual example of how genres of competing historical narratives and redemptive tragedies emerge, and
eventually lead to spiritually transformed and politically active
communities.

Cultural Trauma, Collective Identity and

Prophetic Narrations

Employing the concept of trauma, both social and individual, for literary and cultural analysis in terms of their representations, dispersions and manifestations is not a new interest in literary criticism. However, it gained significance in
the last two decades as a means of politicizing and mobilizing
literary studies and expanding literary text to historical narratives and historiography, particularly in the context of the
Holocaust2. The term cultural trauma in this essay is used in
the sense that social theorists Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompkadefine define it in their collaborative work Cultural Trauma and
Collective Identity (2004). This “cultural trauma theory” distinguishes itself from previous approaches to collective trauma

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