152-155

Bediuzzaman Said Nursî was held in the village of Barla under constant and severe oppression and surveillance. The reason for his exile was to prevent the Islamic zeal in his rûh from erupting, silence him, prevent him from speaking and writing about îmân and Islam by taking him away from populated cities and throwing him to an isolated village, and prevent him from the jihad against irreligious people and from serving the Qur’an by keeping him inactive and unproductive. But Bediuzzaman was successful in doing completely contrary to their plans. He was never inactive and unproductive for even a moment; he wrote the Risale-i Nur that gives lessons on the haqiqahs of the Qur’an and îmân and ensured their dissemination in secret in a secluded place like Barla. This success and this triumph were magnificent victories because, during that terrible period of irreligion, not a single true religious work was allowed to be written; all ‘ulamâ were silenced and efforts were made to destroy them. The irreligious could not destroy Bediuzzaman; they were unable to prevent his dissemination of îmân and Islam that revived the numbed hearts and minds. This dissemination of religious works carried by Bediuzzaman was a work that no other person could have done during the twenty-five-year period of extreme oppression and absolute tyranny.

Bediuzzaman was exiled to Barla in the years 1925-1926. These years were the early period of implementation of absolute despotism in Turkey that would continue for twenty-five years. The covert irreligious committees were pushing for their plans to confiscate all copies of the Qur’an, eradicate them and destroy the Islamic rûh by repealing shaâ’er one by one. Thinking shaytanically that this plan could not be achieved, they devised a new plan that would result in the Qur’an being demolished by the hands of the future generation that would come thirty years later; they started to implement this plan. To destroy Islam, devastation and aggression unprecedented in history were carried out.

All efforts were made to break all kinds of ties between the Turkish nation and children of this country — who for six hundred years, challenged the whole world as a flag bearer of Al-Qur’an Al-Hakîm, rather for a thousand years since the Abbasids — and the Muslim identity in order to distance and deprive them of Islam, and they were indeed successful. This was not a particular event but a universal one concerning the entire Muslim world. It was a large-scale universal event concerning the îmân and belief of millions of people, especially the youths and the millions of innocents and students, and the catastrophe that would befall them in the world and âkhirah, and it was connected with the eternal lives of the people of Anatolia until the qiyâmah.

At that time, throughout those years, terrible revolutions and destructions against Islam and the Qur’an were carried out in the life of a heroic nation that, as testified by its thousand-year shining history, has held the highest exalted rank as the flag bearer of the Qur’an. The future generations and students were made to forget their honoured ancestors buried in history and the glorious past of the world’s most renowned army that spanned a thousand years of jihâd. The ground was being prepared for the communist regime by severing all their ties to the past and deceiving them with apparently glittering veiled words! In place of the most elevated principles of civilisation and the highest material and ma’nawî development already present in the haqiqahs of Islam, the covert communists, freemasons and irreligious were indoctrinating the principles devoid of nûr in the swamp of irreligious philosophy and the ideologies of intellectuals and philosophers devoid of virtue. These principles and ideologies were being taught on a very vast scale by using the education system. The main aim of the enemies of Islam, especially the British and the French, was to exploit and deteriorate the Islamic world from the material and ma’nawî aspects, and it was their plan to distance the heroic Turkish nation from any religious ties and bring Turkish nation to a state completely contrary to Islam regarding customs, traditions and morality. Unfortunately, these plans have already been put into action!

Thus, the years that Bediuzzaman Said Nursî began his Qur’anic service and his service for îmân in Anatolia with the Risale-i Nur as a hero of Islam striving self-sacrificingly were the beginning and establishment of an extremely terrible era of irreligion that had never been witnessed on earth before; therefore, it is necessary to keep such a terrifying time in mind when Bediuzzaman and his service with the Risale-i Nur are considered.