Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 82

82 • Emel Taştekin
philosophy, the type that possibly leads to disbelief and atheism
(Vahide 111). Even though, in Nursi’s view, his appeal for the
hearts of the believers corresponded to a rejection of social and
political life, “the luminous bond” that Nursi desired though his
“jihad of the mind” is today a powerful political force that must
be reckoned with (Nursi 11).
NOTES

According to his followers and biographers, Nursi’s life has two distinguished phases throughout which he continued to write the Risale: the Old Said and the New Said. Hakan Yavuz, for
example, comments that Nursi’s “transitional journey” from Old Said to New Said coincides
precisely with the official declaration of the Turkish Republic by Kemal Ataturk in April, 1923.
After the radical secularism of the Kemalists strictly ruled out a faith-based politics in Turkey,
Nu