A FUNDAMENTAL AESTHETIC: SAID NURSI’S RE-WRITING OF THE QUR’AN INTO THE IDIOM OF MODERNITY
A FUNDAMENTAL AESTHETIC: SAID NURSI’S RE-WRITING OF THE QUR’AN INTO THE IDIOM OF MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: Modernity in Europe led to widespread retreat from orthodox Christian belief,whereas in the Muslim world religious expression has been maintained. Where British authors regretted the passing of traditional views of the world and the cost of this in terms of culture, the writings of the twentieth-century Muslim revivalist author Said Nursi demonstrate how, by a combination of faithfulness to the fundamentals of Islamic belief, and a style infused with parables,tropes and purportedly rational argumentation, the masses in modern Turkey could be sustained in their religion. While not a fundamentalist according to key constituents of the term, Nursi nonetheless adheres to the fundamentals of belief about the Qur’an: its inimitability and inerrancy. His writings explain the Qur’an’s effect as imbuing the everyday world with the halo of the miraculous, as he builds a fundamental aesthetic upon this premise. Thomas Carlyle is shown to adopt a comparable evocation of miracle in Sartor Resartus, however a sense of a direct involvement of divinity in the world such as is found in Nursi’s writings is decisively missing,marking the distinction between modern European views of the cosmos and the Muslim author’s still traditionally religious one.

• Details
• Contents