Apolitical Interpretation of Islam: Said Nursi's Faith-Based Activism in Comparison with Political Islamism and Sufism

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Islam has generally been represented in the media as a political ideology and some academics have over-emphasized this political image of Islam. These are not baseless speculations; there are several political Islamic groups worldwide. However, there are also many apolitical Islamic groups. This article analyzes one of the most influential apolitical Islamic movements in the world, the Nurcus, and its founder, Bediüzzaman Said Nursi. Nursi, the author of the Risale-i Nur collection, emphasized the ascetic aspect of Islam: ‘Ninety-nine percent of Islam is about ethics, worship, the hereafter, and virtue. Only one percent is about politics; leave that to the rulers.’ He also added, ‘I seek refuge in God from Satan and [party] politics.’ Through the analysis of Nursi's thought and activism, the article will try to answer the following questions: Was Nursi a Sufi? What are the theological and structural bases of Nursi's apolitical interpretation of Islam? What is the impact of the secular state in Turkey on the development of Nursi's apolitical outlook and activism? What does his apolitical understanding of Islam say to non-Turkish Muslims who do not live in a secular state?     

A Religiological Analysis of Nursi's View of Sufism Expressed in the ‘Nine Allusions’ (Telvihât-ı Tis'a) of the Risale-i Nur

While Nursi stated explicitly that he was not a Sufi, he nevertheless expressed many Sufi perspectives in his work. In particular, his focus in the section of the Risale-i Nur called ‘Nine Allusions’ (Telvihât-? Tis'a) was Sufism. This article uses a method of analysing religious perspectives called ‘religiology’, in order to coherently and systematically unpack Nursi's attitudes to Sufism. Organizing his Sufi perspectives in the categories of epistemology, ontology (including theology, cosmology, and eschatology), anthropology, psychology, teleology, and methodology, the article demonstrates that he agrees with certain aspects of Sufism and disagrees with others.     

Islam and Politics in the Light of Said Nursi's Writings1

This article discusses in its introduction the concept of political Islam as it first developed during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, and Nursi's reaction to politics. The bulk of the article then focuses on Nursi's stance concerning politics. As a prolific author, scholar, and activist, Nursi has a unique place among his contemporaries and the article deliberately elaborates on why Nursi coined his famous statement, ‘I take refuge in God from Satan and politics.’ It also presents a limited comparison between Nursi's interpretation of some qur'anic verses and Sayyid Qutb's interpretation of these same texts.     

Said Nursi on Muslim–Christian Relations Leading to World Peace

This article examines the views of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (1876–1960), specifically with regard to Muslim–Christian relations. It elaborates on his view as presented in his commentary on certain qur'anic verses (specifically 2:2 and 5:51), the first of which indicates that the devout are those who believe in both the Islamic and pre-Islamic revelations, while the second prohibits Muslims from taking Christians and Jews as friends. Nursi's interpretation is unique among all Islamic commentators. The article also discusses qur'anic texts in light of Nursi's famous Damascus sermon, in which he strongly advocates Muslim–Christian cooperation. Finally, the article gives examples from the life and writings of Nursi as references for his understanding of Muslim–Christian relations and the possibility of the cause of world peace being advanced through such positive relationships.     

Normand Laurendeau: Spirituality and Science at the Apex of His Life's Vision

Abstract

This article discusses the noteworthy approach of a twentieth-century Muslim scholar, Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (1877–1960), to the issue of Qur'an and science. Nursi points out the “problem of authoritarianism” in both religious and secularist discourses, arguing that many of the clashes between faith and reason result from a misunderstanding of spheres of expertise. Nursi also argues that even at the height of scientific and technological development, the Qur'an remains indispensable in humankind interpreting the world around them. Nursi's case illustrates that the task of relating the modern science and the Qur'an requires attention to their interpretive dimensions.     

Said Nursi's Moral Philosophy

This article tests the oft-made claim that Islam and democracy are incompatible because of the presumed authoritarianism of religious morality. The article explores the moral philosophy expressed in the early writings of Said Nursi, concluding that by acknowledging individual autonomy and free will and rejecting authoritarianism as inimical to the exercise of conscience, Nursi's moral philosophy lays the groundwork for an Islamic democracy.     

Said Nursi's Teachings on the People of the Book: A case study of Islamic social policy in the early twentieth century

Presented in this paper is a concise biography of Said Nursi (1876-1960) with regard to the People of the Book and Muslim-Christian relations, aimed at giving the reader background into the scholar whose works are subsequently presented and analyzed. Nursi's discussion of the People of the Book and the concept of dhimm I (individual and regional religious protectorate) as developed from qur' # nic references and prophetic traditions (Had I th) is then analyzed. Significantly, through this paper, these key concepts as covered by a scholar as important to the field as Nursi, are made available to English-speaking people for the first time as the author references Nursi's book Munazarat, which has yet to be translated into English.     

INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

Abstract. I explore the contributions of Ibrahim Moosa, a Muslim legal scholar, to a Muslim‐Christian dialogue on religion and science. Moosa begins from the context of Shari'a, Islamic law, and not from the usual issues of the religion‐science dialogue. Beginning as it does from a legal tradition, the approach suggests a perspective on science and religion that is particular to Islam and provides insight into how an authentic dialogue between Muslims and Christians would proceed—and thereby an alternative model for a religion‐science dialogue.     

ISLAM AND SCIENCE: CONTRADICTION OR CONCORDANCE

Abstract. Many question whether Islam and science can be compatible. In the first six hundred years of Islam, Muslims addressed all fields of knowledge available to them with unprecedented zeal and contributed immensely to the knowledge that became the precursor of the Renaissance in Europe. The Tatar invasion in the thirteenth century and the total destruction of Baghdad, the Muslim capital of knowledge and science, followed by the crusades, the ensuing hostility between East and West, and Western colonialism of Muslim countries led to a distrust of all knowledge emanating from the West. Such distrust closed the doors to ijtihad, a dynamic method in Islamic jurisprudence for addressing change, new demands, and new acquired knowledge, even though the Qur'an challenges Muslims to think, contemplate, understand, comprehend, and examine everything around them—tasks that bring humankind closer to God as they find methods to apply God's laws of justice and equity to the benefit of all humankind. Islam is the religion of yusr (ease) and not ‘usr (hardship). The creation of the world was for human benefit and use. Innovation for such beneficial use and application is a must.     

The limits of religion: liberalism and anti-liberalism in the Islamic Republic of Iran

This essay investigates the ways that ‘religion,’ as a particular category of discourse, organised Muslim debates in the Islamic Republic of Iran during the 1990s and early 2000s. Recent work in the study of religion has highlighted not only liberalism’s privatised and largely protestant notion of religion, but also the ways that understanding of religion affects the representation of Islam in the West. Studies of Islam, continuing the critique of liberal assumptions regarding religion, often uphold a traditionalist understanding of Islam as an equally valuable way of being in the world. This article, in contrast, explores the ways that liberal religion figures in both liberal and anti-liberal Muslim debate. Specifically, it traces the ways that Muslim theology (kalām) draws upon and contests the rationality and secularity of the world and, in so doing, turns the gaze back to continuing discontents with liberalism in the West.     

Islam and politics in Indonesia: The political thought of Abdurrahman Wahid

Abdurrahman Wahid is one of the few prominent contemporary Islamic leaders in Indonesia who is often considered controversial. Some studies have been conducted of his idea of Islamic reform in general, and his political thought in particular, but they do not try to make a coherent link between Abdurrahman's Islamic theology and his political thought. In this article, I argue that Abdurrahman's concepts of ‘Islamic universalism’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ’pribumisasi’ are strongly attached to his political thought, i.e. his idea of Islam and state relationship, of Islam and Pancasila and of democracy. The arguments developed by Abdurrahman to support his ideas are not uncommon among other Islamic reformers, especially the idea of maslaha. However, his endeavor to put Islamic ideals in Indonesian context can be considered unique and innovative.     

PEIRCE'S PRAGMATIC THEOLOGY AND STOIC RELIGIOUS ETHICS1

Charles S. Peirce believed that his pragmatic philosophy could reconcile religion and science and that this reconciliation involves a religious ethics creating a real community with the cosmos and God. After some rival pragmatic approaches to God and religious belief inconsistent with Peirce's philosophy are set aside, his metaphysical plan for a reconciliation of religion and science is outlined. A panentheistic God makes the best match with his desired conclusions from the Neglected Argument for the reality of God, and this God is also capable of fulfilling the pragmatic role demanded by Peirce's ethical expectations for the intelligent functioning of religion. The discussion proceeds to an elaboration of the aesthetic, metaphysical, and ethical elements of Peirce's philosophical system, which indicate why Peirce's religious ethics is best categorized as akin to Stoicism, with some Christian elements. For Peirce, religious ethics proceeds from the (potentially universal) agapic community's cooperation with God's loving creativity of the universe.     

Jesus' Prophethood and Islam: Insights from the Risale‐i Nur

While Jesus’ prophethood is an indisputable component of his identity in the Christian tradition, it has been marginalized for centuries in favor of his identity as savior. In this article, I argue that an engagement with an understanding of Jesus’ prophethood in Islam, particularly as explicated by the Turkish thinker Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, can help Christians recover a more robust interpretation of Jesus as prophet that has a positive impact on a Christian articulation of the church and of discipleship today.     

A Religiously Partisan Science? Islamic and Christian Perspectives

Both within Christianity and Islam we can find influential scholars who maintain that science is not religiously neutral because it contains a naturalist bias. They argue that Christians or Muslims should respond by developing their own kind of science, an “Islamic science,” a “sacred science,” a “theistic science” or a “faith-informed science.” In this article the recent writings of two advocates of such a view, standing in two different religious traditions, namely Mehdi Golshani (Islam) and Alvin Plantinga (Christianity) are compared, analyzed, and evaluated. A distinction between different ways in which religion might enter into the fabric of science is introduced and it is argued that the most crucial issues surround the question of whether or not religion ought to play a part in the validation of theories.     

BARBOUR'S TYPOLOGIES AND THE CONTEMPORARY DEBATE ON ISLAM AND SCIENCE

Abstract Despite various criticisms, Ian Barbour's fourfold classification of the possible relationships between religion and science remains influential. I compare Barbour's taxonomy with the theories of four authors who, in the last four decades, have addressed the relationship between science and religion from a Muslim perspective. The aim of my analysis is twofold. First, I offer a comparative perspective to the debate on science and Islam. Second, following Barbour's suggestion, I test the general applicability of his categories by comparing them with a discourse on science and religion that is not focused on Christianity. In the first section, I reconstruct Barbour's typologies, recalling some major objections to them, and arguing why despite the latter, Barbour's model is employed for the present analysis. I also reconstruct Barbour's parallel model for the relationships between different religions. In the second section, I reconstruct the discourse on science and religion developed by the Palestinian‐American scholar Ismail Raji al‐Faruqi. The third section is devoted to the ideas of the Persian‐American scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr. In the fourth section, I examine the views of the Iranian author Mehdi Golshani. The fifth section reconstructs the theories of the Algerian author Nidhal Guessoum. In the final section, I argue that a generalized use of the “integration” concept to refer to the entire debate on Islam and science is unhelpful. While these positions do not appear to instantiate Barbourian integration of science and religion, they do move toward what Barbour (skeptically) describes as integration between religions.     

Adorno,Hegel, and Dialectic

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative (famously simplified as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’). Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradictions require reconciliation, but differs from Hegel on the nature of reconciliation. For Hegel, reconciliation unites differences into a whole; for Adorno, reconciled differences co-exist as differences. Finally, against Habermas who holds that Adorno cannot consistently criticize the enlightenment practice of critique, I show that Adorno can do so consistently because of how he reshapes Hegelian dialectic.     

Edward Wilmot Blyden's understanding of Christianity and Islam as instruments of black emancipation in West Africa

In the words of Leopold Senghor, Blyden (1832–1912), was ‘le premier et principal précurseur de la Nigritude comme de l‘African Personality’. For sixty years Blyden tried to persuade members of his own race (whom he consistently called Negroes) to exchange what he saw as their permanent subjugation by whites in the Americas for the prospect of liberation in their cultural home, Africa. His campaign prompted him to ask if either of the two major religious systems, Christianity and Islam, could serve the cause of black emancipation. How useful had they been in the past? How useful could they be in the future? Blyden's pragmatic, selective, approach to the two cases of institutionalized religion in West Africa is subjected to scrutiny.     

Paul Tillich's Perspectives on Ways of Relating Science and Religion

Where do Paul Tillich's views of the relationship between religion and science fit in Ian Barbour's four classifications of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration? At different levels of analysis, he fits in all of them. In concrete religions and sciences, some conflict is evident, but religion and science can be thought of as having parallel perspectives, languages, and objectives. Tillich's method of correlation itself is a form of dialogue. His theology of nature in “Life and the Spirit” (Part 4 of his Systematic Theology) fits the integration type. His strong “Two Types of Philosophy of Religion” (in Theology of Culture) is a latent natural theology. His system of the sciences is a form of synthesis, a type of integration.     

Massignon,Vatican II and Islam as an Abrahamic religion

The qur'anic material about Abraham corresponds in broad outline to the biblical story although it contains some novel features, including the claim that Islam is the religion of Abraham and that together with Ishmael he rebuilt the Kaaba. The article surveys the largely negative responses of Byzantine polemicists, medieval Western authors, and later orientalists, to Islam's avowedly Abrahamic pedigree. It then examines the work of Louis Massignon and his circle, and discusses the extent to which his conviction that Islam was an Abrahamic religion, like Judaism and Christianity, influenced Vatican II. Some precursors of Massignon are mentioned, his attitude to the qur'anic representation of Abraham is criticized in the light of recent research, and his interest’ in Abraham is shown to have been intimately bound up with the peculiar circumstances of his own life.     

The struggle to be seen: Muslim–Christian relations and religious (in)visibility at the Hispano–Moroccan borderland

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the ways in which Muslim–Christian relations occur in the Hispano–Moroccan borderland, more precisely, in the North-African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. It argues that, in these two Spanish autonomous cities, the relations between Christians and Muslims are articulated through a symbolic system in which the former exercise the capacity of being apparent, whereas the latter tend to be ‘pushed away’ from the visible, although they exert resistance. This results in a decrease of Muslims’ degree of public exposure. The article critically assesses the relational dynamics between Muslims and Christians in Ceuta and Melilla against the trope of ‘invisibility’, by looking at how they use religion to exert these enunciations: a) I briefly contextualize historically the setting, b) I explore how religion is racialized, c) I look at the use of historical vocabulary and narratives on religion to manifest intergroup conflict, d) I expose how the regime of (in)visibility unfolds, e) I scrutinize the recent development by which Christians participate in making Islam more visible and the resulting consequences this has on the relations between the two groups. The article assesses why and how religion provides the language through which these particular forms of ‘othering’ are manifested.