Said Nursi split his own life into an Old Said and a New Said
Said Nursi, the Kurdish scholar whose Qur'anic commentary runs past six thousand pages, looked back on his life as three different men. The first chased politics, the second renounced it to write in prison and exile, and the third lived out a quieter freedom. His followers now number in the millions.
He was born Sait Okur in 1877 in Nurs, a Kurdish village in the Ottoman province of Bitlis, one of seven children in a family of modest means. He never earned the traditional diploma, drifting instead between madrasas and local sheikhs. Stories of his memory spread early: a teacher in Siirt reportedly handed him Al-Hariri's Maqamat, watched him learn a page in a single reading, and told other scholars, who began calling him Bediüzzaman, wonder of the age. He is said to have finished a madrasa curriculum of over a hundred books in three months.
From 1897 to 1907 he lived in Van under the patronage of its governor, Tahir Pasha, whose library introduced him to history, geography, mathematics, physics, chemistry and astronomy. Out of that grew a lasting conviction that religious schools should teach modern science and secular schools should teach religion. He planned an eastern university combining both; Sultan Mehmed V funded it and construction began in 1913, but the First World War ended the project.
That war also brought him to the front against Russia, where he commanded volunteers, broke his leg, and was captured. He spent about two and a half years in a prison camp at Kostroma before escaping in the chaos after the February Revolution and returning to Istanbul in June 1918. Legend adds a near-execution for refusing to stand before Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich.
His Islamic vision clashed with Atatürk's secular republic, and in 1924 he withdrew to Van. Around this time he dropped the name Said-i Kurdî for Said Nursi. The decades of his New Said period, mostly spent in jail and exile, produced the Risale-i Nur, which argues for faith through reason rather than mysticism. Released from Afyon prison in 1949, he lived with relative freedom until his death in 1960. One 2008 estimate put his movement at 5 to 6 million adherents.
Source: Said Nursi
