Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 78

ODAK

78 • Emel Taştekin
ing create and how did it result in the rich allegories and metaphors in Risale that attracts so many modern readers today?
First of all, we need to establish that the complete removal of
the traditional system was perceived as a trauma to the collective consciousness of the Turks. Vahide observes that with the
secular Republic, Islam “was to be systematically extirpated
from all aspects of life,” which for Nursi meant persecution and
exile, and the most importantly, the emergence of the phase referred to as “New Said.” It was in this phase that the meaning of
jihad for Nursi transformed from a physical / political struggle
to a jihad of the word, nonphysical jihad, or “positive action”
[manevi cihad ] (Vahide 98–100). Mardin comments that Risale
took on the role of “Muslim collective representation [that] was
denied a role in Republican Turkey” (157). Reed, who clearly sympathizes with Nursi’s cause, describes Risale as a work
of “organic abundance, order and luxuriance” compared to the
“the spiritual barrenness imposed by the secularists who ripped
Turkey from a past of immense richness” (Abu-Rabi’ 42). What
these scholars observe in common is that Nursi offers as an alternative an “imagined Islamic consciousness” in reviving the
traditional Islamic symbols in Risale and combining them with
the theories and “scientific facts”