Who’s Badiuzzeman Said Nursi (1877-1960)?

Badiuzzam Said Nursi was born in 1877 in eastern Turkey and died in 1960 in Urfa (Turkey). During his long life, he saw the last days of the Ottoman Empire, its collapse after the First World War and the emergence of modern Turkish Republic.

He also witnessed the twenty-five years of Republican Peoples’ Party’s harsh and authoritarian rule and ten years of “Democratic” rule during which conditions became a little easier for Bediuzzam.

A remarkable child endowed with a prodigious memory, Bediuzzam completed a traditional madrasah education at the early age of fourteen and then studies physical sciences, mathematics and philosophy.

In the course of the second decade of his life, he became extremely convinced that the Turkish madrasah education was inadequate and his own interest in natural sciences led him to construct a new curriculum for the Islamic educational system. He prepared a blue print for the establishment of a university, Medrestu’z Zehra, (the Resplendent Madrasah) in the Eastern Provinces.

In 1917, he arrived in Istanbul and met Sultan Abdul Hamid. Subsequently, he received some funding for the construction of the university and its foundations were laid in 1913. But the beginning of World War I and the subsequent events made it impossible for this project to materialize.

The end of World War I and that of the Ottoman Empire culminated the first phase of Bediuzzam’s life, the period of the “Old Said”, as he would later call it. During the War, he had led the militia forces on the Caucasian Front against the invading Russians for which he was later awarded a War Medal. He was taken prisoner in March 1916 and was held in Russia for two years. In early 1918, he escaped from the prison and made his way back to Istanbul via Warsaw, Berlin and Vienna.

Read full article here. (By Muzaffar Iqbal)
Related: Database on Badiuzzaman Said Nursi

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