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| Publications [#198949] of Mustafa Tuna
Papers Accepted
- Mustafa Tuna, Reconciling Observation with Revelation from Ghazali to Nursi: Reading of the "Book of the Universe" and a Paradigmatic Shift in the Islamic Tradition,
in (tentative) Contemporary Islam: Nursi’s Response the Problems of the Islamic World, edited by Zeki Sarıtoprak
(2012-13)
(last updated on 2011/12/11)
Abstract:
One hundred years after Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s Damascus sermon, some of the solutions that he suggested for the pressing problems of the Muslim ummah in this sermon and in his later works appear to be rather commonsensical and doable. However, a look at the outcomes of the efforts of Muslim intellectuals and activists at the turn of the twentieth century to address these problems reveals that what appears to be commonsensical and doable today was indeed confusing and puzzling for many Muslims a century ago. In my presentation, I would like to compare Nursi’s views on reconciling empirical observation and Enlightenment reason with Islam to the similar efforts of the late-nineteenth century Russian Muslim intellectuals in the Volga-Ural region. These intellectuals often did not suspect the compatibility of scientific thinking with Islam and introduced modern science into the region’s madrasas. However, many students who attended those madrasas ended up recognizing reason as a more reliable path to truth than revelation, failed to reconcile the two, and moved away from Islam. This reconciliation indeed required a paradigmatic shift within the Islamic tradition that was widely dominant at the turn of the twentieth century. And Nursi, who built an entire corpus of thinking on the idea of harmony between the observed universe and the Qur’anic revelation, is one of the few Muslim thinkers who have enabled that paradigmatic shift.
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