The Sixth Letter of Said Nursi
A point at which study circles for beginners may first approach the thought of Ustaz Said Nursi is through his Sixth Letter. Its theme is alienation from this world, and exile within it. Presumably few approach thoughts as difficult as those of the Risale-i Nur without some inkling of what it means to be, as it were, out of place.
Is this a universal experience? Certainly there is something along these lines that takes a rather commanding presence in modern cultural and intellectual life in Europe. One might wonder whether ennui or spleen (in the French poetry of the 19th century); Angst or Sorge (in the German tradition in existentialist philosophy); the dread of Kierkegaard; the horror of Conrad; the nausée of Sartre; and innumerable other expressions of finding oneself out of place all represent more or less the same state, and all represent something universal. In each case, the sense of dislocation is said to be ontological, not psychological — disclosing, that is, something essential and intrinsic to human nature that rational analysis alone fails to uncover. These are the moments wherein the self stands out, starkly differentiated, utterly alone, cast into this world, and bound for death under the condition that no other self can ever die for him, in his stead.
The voice of modern European philosophy finds itself in this experience as the only truly authentic moment any individual can experience. After, say, Nietzsche, it is no longer possible to defer either to a religious system, nor to reason, to establish firm foundations upon which a system of rational certainty may be erected. One’s dislocation alone stands out as a primary, irreducible point of departure. Nothing else is so immediate or, one supposes, so indisputably real.
This experience of alienation as the primary locus of the self — the taste of one’s own mouth, in Sartre’s phrase — is not described as such in pre-19th century European culture. Was it therefore entirely novel, a product of novel social conditions rather than something genuinely ontological, as so many once claimed? Does this experience therefore arise from a uniquely modern, and uniquely Western, sensibility? Does an encounter with it come to Ustaz Nursi together with the irruption of modernity into the previously ordered life of the Ottoman intellectual elites? Or is it simply the case that the sense of exile present in the Sixth Letter refers to something entirely different?
What Ustaz Nursi experiences, he calls gurbet. This Ottoman word has its origins in Arabic, and the many resonances of the word and its root are brought out in a passage attributed to Abu Hayyan Tawhidi, active in Shiraz around the beginning of the fifth Islamic century:
The stranger [gharîb] is the one whose beautiful sun has set [gharabat], who is far from [ightaraba] his Beloved and those who blame (lovers in love), who acts strangely [aghraba] in word and action, who enters strange ground [gharraba] in both progress and retrogression, who presents a strange picture [istaghraba] in his tattered clothes. The stranger is one whose appearance speaks of one tribulation after the other, who bears the mark of disturbance after disturbance, and whose reality becomes clear to him in the continuity of time. He is the one who is absent when he is present and who is present when he is absent. He is the one whom you do not know when you see him and whom you do not wish to know when you do not know him.[1]
Thus exile, as gurbet is translated, has everything to do with being a stranger in one’s place, and feeling estranged from one’s times. Ustaz Nursi makes it clear from the beginning that, in his case at least, it is this world and the life of this world (both of which are implied by the term he uses here, dünya) that are the locus for the experience of gurbet. It is not because he is far from some home here in the world that he experiences this, but because he is in this world at all.
It would, I think, be a mistake to accept too readily the view that Ustaz Nursi’s sense of gurbet is largely reducible to a confrontation with, or a sense of dislocation within, modernity.[2] It is true that his writing emerges at a time shared by other Muslim thinkers whose encounter with modernity strongly inflects the thoughts they have left behind — Muhammad ‘Abduh, for instance. And it is also true that part of the project of the Risale-i Nur is to rethink Islam for contemporary conditions. But there are many ways this can be done. Are we really to understand the reflections on gurbet in this letter as nothing more than a literary device for capturing the nature of this grand social struggle? The temptation to neutralize the immediacy of the experience of gurbet by reducing it to its historical and sociological correlates is itself an accession to the demands of modernity. How can one approach gurbet in this way and still purport to uncover anything at all about the nature of this encounter from the side that resists it?
I think it is also a mistake to defuse Ustaz Nursi’s thoughts still further by particularizing even the personal, non-political dimension of his writing to a response to a situation that is only his. Thus the following passage (however relevant to so many individuals’ experiences in the world) saliently misses the point:
Nursi’s personal experiences, especially the times when he spent up to three weeks in isolation in the mountains[3], are instructive. His life provides an example of how it is possible to conquer the profound sense of loneliness and alienation experienced by the immigrant in an alien and hostile environment. It sets a paradigm for survival, for seeking solace and affirmation from God by attempting to dwell in His presence. In the process, the experience of ghurbah, “estrangement,” is transformed into uns, “companionship.” Nursi described his life in exile as one of profound pain, of being alone and separated from all peers, loved ones, and relatives, deprived of all things dear to him, exiled from his native land, and enveloped with a profound sense of estrangement from himself. He found comfort in waiting on the Lord.[4]
The point is missed because (as the Sixth Letter shows most clearly), isolation from one’s fellows is only “the first of five exiles of different hues [birbiri icinde bes muhtelif renkli gurbetlerde].”[5] What of the other four? It is also clear that this first gurbet has to do with far more than a momentary separation from one’s fellows within the dünya. Ustaz Nursi writes:
due to old age, I was alone and a stranger away from the great majority of my friends, relations, and those close to me; I felt a sad exile at their having left me and departed for the Intermediate Realm [âlem-i Berzah].[6]
This departure, for the ‘âlam al-barzâkh, between dunyâ’ and âkhira, is no mundane separation. But more important is this question: Why is it that the one who, like Ustaz Nursi, is left behind is in exile, rather than the one who has left this world for another? Can one truly be in exile in the place one has always dwelt? This is the point around which the notion that gurbet is synonymous with loneliness, physical isolation, or solitude collapses. The sense of gurbet developed in the Sixth Letter truly is ontological. The immigrant in an alien and hostile environment is neither more nor less the exile when he is abroad in the dünya than he is in that part of the dünya that he embraces as his home.[7]
I would therefore propose that the encounter with modernity is incidental; that the immediate circumstances of these writings, albeit agonizing, are coincidental; and that the sense of gurbet is instead an expression of how the human being is constituted ontologically, in every time and place. That one is addressed in and through his actual situation hardly demonstrates that the significance of the address is correspondingly limited. If anything, the experience of gurbet — not at all a product of passing solitude in some contingent circumstance — is in every sense an expression of the way human beings are designed that enables them to become fully themselves under any set of circumstances.
If, as Muslims are taught, the creation is tajallî — divine semiosis — then this experience is a means through which the Divine Will is made known. What’s more, the word tajallî
also denotes that the Divine mysteries have become apparent in the heart of the seeker by means of the light of knowledge of God Almighty. Every traveller to the Truth can feel this favor in the conscience according to capacity and station.[8]
Thus the gurbet experienced by Ustaz Nursi is more properly understood as something meant for him as a way of addressing him as it was most appropriate for him in that moment to be addressed, rather than as something to endure, and from which to flee towards and illusory and self-narcotizing solace with his Lord. While it was most certainly a test, it was also an invitation — and Ustaz Nursi understood it as such.
This is made clear from the fact that particular circumstances (the five exiles of this one individual) yield first “five luminous and familiar spheres” expressed through the Qur’ân, and then a demonstration of that which constitutes the nature of every human being without exception. What is at first crushing, because it is radically individuating, at last exposes an avenue of approach to divine mercy and favor open to all through the manner in which human being is constituted ontologically. It is in the nature of the human being to experience the Divine Presence in and through gurbet because gurbet is the nature of the human being.
Working backwards from the end of the Sixth Letter, we observe this in the following ways. Ustaz Nursi is drawn to complete his work here and enter “a light-filled, pleasurable, true exile [nurlu, zevkli hakiki bir gurbet].”[9] It is clear that the experience of exile (and not the exile itself) continues so long as he cannot hand himself over to this annihilation completely. Thus gurbet is the overwhelming and miserable sense of a differentiated self whose cure is to “forget the world” in “absolute annihilation.”
The words absolute annihilation are Mevlânâ’s, specifically: dhawq baqâ’.[10] Thus the word zevk in the original Ottoman text alludes explicitly to the couplet of Rumi’s poetry with its use of the word dhawq, though this allusion is lost in the English translation. The word baqâ’ is likewise highly significant in the Sufi lexicon, and further indicative of Ustaz Nursi’s intention here:
By their use of the term annihilation (fana) — passing away — the Sufis indicate the disappearance of blameworthy characteristics. By the term subsistence (baqa) — abiding in God — they indicate the establishment of praiseworthy characteristics. […] The servant’s annihilation from his contemptible actions and low states is in the disappearance of these actions, and his annihilation from himself and other people is in his giving up the perception of himself and of them.[11]
Ustaz Nursi has shared in the sense of alienation mentioned at the beginning of this set of comments (i.e., ennui, spleen, Angst, Sorge, dread, horror, nausée) — though unlike those philosophers and poets who may also have been permitted a sense of this, Ustaz Nursi knows what it means, where it leads, and what it is like for the experience of acute separation to be transformed into blissful and enduring presence with his Lord.
This is indeed a universal experience, even if the prescribed response to it has not been universally discovered. If the acute, overwhelming sense of the individuated self is at the root of the experience of alienation, it is the annihilation of this self that is its cure. As in, it would seem, so many instances, philosophy diagnoses correctly that for which it is utterly powerless to propose a cure. The five types of gurbet are transformed through, not merely the discovery of, but the full embrace of, the ontological condition they bring to the foreground, through: “impotence and reliance on God, and poverty and seeking refuge with Him [acz ve tevekkül, fakr ve iltica].” In the end, it is to experience gurbet not as an incidental sensation or a psychological state, but as the positive and reverential response to the hadîth that we be in the world as a stranger or a wayfarer that transforms everything.
[1] This passage, from Franz Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam”, Arabica 44(1): 57 (January 1997), is cited by Ibrahim M. Abu Rabi’ in his article “How to Read Said Nursi’s Risale-i Nur” (in Abu Rabi’, ed., Islam at the Crossroads: On the Life and thought of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003], p. 85 n. 51).
[2] This view is expressed in particular by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, “Gurbah as Paradigm for Muslim Life: A Risale-i Nur Worldview” (pp. 237-253 in Abu Rabi’, ed., ibid).
[3] This reference to three weeks in isolation in the mountains appears to originate directly from the Sixth Letter.
[4] Haddad, “Ghurbah,” p. 247.
[5] Letters VI, p. 42; Mektûbat VI, p. 22.
[6] Ibid.
[7] The answer to the question (Can one truly be in exile in the place one has always dwelt?) is strongly inflected by whether or not one believes there is only dünya. Thus the believer in the message of the Qur’ân readily asserts that one dwells here only transiently, that this world is not in any true sense in the place one has always dwelt.
[8] M. Fethullah Gülen, Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism (Somerset, NJ: The Light, 2004), vol. 2, p. 115.
[9] Letters VI, p. 44; Mektûbat VI, p. 24. Note that the use of the word zevk in this phrase carries with it a sense that the translation pleasurable very much obscures, being derived from the Arabic dhawq. This is, briefly, the difference between a sense of reality obtained propositionally or inferentially, and that had through direct experience. In the famous Sufi lexicon of al-Qushayri, this is defined as
experience of the fruits of divine manifestation, the results of the disclosure of secrets, and the appearance of subtle inner conditions. When this experience begins, it is called tasting [dhawq].
(Imam al-Qushayri, The Risalah [Chicago: Kazi, 2002], p. 92.) Note that in the Arabic text, the fruits of divine manifestation translates thamarât at-tajallî.
[10] Mektûbat VI, p. 24
[11] Imam al-Qushayri, Risalah, pp. 86, 87.
