Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 76

ODAK

76 • Emel Taştekin
fragmented and ethnic nationalism as it may be perceived sometimes. I argue that Nursi’s Risale integrates this ideology into
its progressive narrative while at the same time representing the
Western versions of nationalist ideologies as the “other” to his
ideal of a unified Islam. Mardin notes that, by the middle of the
nineteenth century, the nationalist ideologies together with the
secularizing reforms had transformed Islam from “something
that was lived and not questioned” to something more “Islamic”
namely “a religion emerged on its own well-delineated field”
(117). Hakan Yavuz, another sociologist, argues that “Islamic
political consciousness [was formed] as an imagined community” posed against an “imagined other,” which was Western
culture and philosophy. Yavuz further observes “a profound
paradox” in the works of modern Islamic thinkers such as Nursi
in that “they want to be contemporary and up to date in terms of
their references and theoretical tools, but they also want to overcome this sense of contemporaneousness by positing ‘retrieved’
tradition to challenge modernity” (120).

Pan-Islamism as the contradictory model was not only an
Ottoman response but an international affair supported by dissenting and anti-colonialist voices within Europe. It was mainly
within early nineteenth-century European thought that “Islam
[was] being constructed as an Utopia that offers everything that
Western modernity failed to establish” (Mardin 99). For instance, German-Jewish scholars developed a sympathetic or at

Secular Trauma and Religious Myth • 77

least more neutral account of Islamic history partially in reaction
to the rising German / Indo-European nativism and intellectual
anti-Semitism they observed in their surroundings. Philosophically speaking, these Jewish scholars sided with Islam on the
basis of “ethical monotheism” as an alternative to the Protestant
ethics implicit in the idealist and speculative philosophies at the
time3. A similar defense of ethical monotheism is a significant
motive in Nursi’s Risale in response to the “Western philosophy” he claims to have overcome before reaching the truth and
light of Islam. The paradox of Pan-Islamism becomes apparent
when we realize that it both constitutes a reaction against the
fragmentation and nativism implied by Turkish nationalist ideologies and at the same time, it integrates the very principles of
such an ideology by representing Islam as a utopian supernation. I therefore argue that explaining the case of Risale-i Nur
in terms of Andersonian critique of nationalist ideologies, as
Yavuz does in his study, is insufficient since it does not account
for the reaction and resistance towards Western style secular
nationalisms, which already during the Tanzimat reforms were
emerging as a threat to Turkey’s Muslim identity.

Agent: The Representations of Trauma in Risale-i Nur

As mentioned earlier, cultural trauma theory employs
“speech act theory” to identify the situation, agents and audience in the trauma construction process. What sort of an agent
did this background of educational reform and nationalist think-

monograf 2014/1