Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 80

ODAK

80 • Emel Taştekin
clude that these were made of tinted glasses and imagined to
darken vision.

Another interesting observation can be made in the Sermon is that it is full of prophetic allusions. The use of the tinted
spectacles is itself a futuristic reference, since at the time when
the sermon was delivered in 1911, sunglasses probably were
not such widely used objects. This can be explained by the fact
that Nursi translated this sermon from Arabic into Turkish in
the 1950s. A similar futuristic reference is made to the “atomic
bomb,” as an apocalyptic event that will bring an end to disbelief. A more striking futuristic reference, which is like the other
references blended into the original text of the Sermon as if it
they have happened already, is a vague allusion to the “attacks”
of the secular Republic. While Risale was not banned nor was
Nursi himself persecuted at the time when the sermon was delivered, Nursi describes what actually happened to him after the
Republic was established: “They have deprived many youths
and others of the truths of belief. But their most violent attacks,
vicious treatment, lies and propaganda have been directed at
the Risale-i Nur, to destroy it and to scare people away from
it and to give it up” (18). More striking is a “prophecy” that
refers to a more specific event, again skillfully woven into the
original sermon itself. Nursi prophesizes that “the true dawn
broke in [1951] or it will break,” with both the past tense and
the future tense employed (32). A outside editor, rather than ac-

Secular Trauma and Religious Myth • 81

knowledging Nursi’s obvious addition during translation, notes
in a footnote that Nursi foresaw the election of the Democratic
Party in 1950—which meant the end of his persecution and exile—through “a presentiment” (Nursi 27). The sermon contains
further promises about an Islamic future, such as “the Ottoman
state was pregnant with Europe and gave birth to a European
state” and “Europe and America are pregnant with Islam” (35).

In short, the poetic imagination in Risale matches the prophetic dimension of the text to construct Turkey’s Islamic past as
something that has been forcefully removed but can be revived
by the will of the people. As cultural trauma theorists would put
it, Risale exemplifies a progressive narrative with its creation of
a mythopoeic repository that surpasses the genres of theology,
scriptural interpretation or political manifesto, and borders at
modernist literature. Mardin notes that “the allusive and metaphorical rhetoric had a direct impact on people’s hearts which
theology, whether orthodox or mystical, could not match,” and
interestingly compares Nursi’s style to magic realism (Mardin
176–78). Indeed, The Damascus Sermon, with its allusiveness
offers to assimilate other instances of suffering from that historical period into a grand trauma narrative that poses Western philosophy and civilization as the perpetrators against “the
truths of the Qur’an” (Nursi 9). Vahide comments that Nursi developed his notion of “Jihad of the mind” to counter the power
of Western philosophy, by which he means Western materialist

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