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Birth and Early Childhood The village of Nurs straggles along the bottom of the south-facing slopes of a range of the massive Taurus Mountains south of Lake Van in the province of Bitlis in eastern Anatolia. Its deep valley is carved through the mountains from Hizan, the nearest township some ten hours away on foot. Until the road was built in the 1980s the only path to the village followed this valley, along which flows the rushing stream that borders the south side of the village. The settlement is surprisingly rich in vegetation, and the varied greens of its trees—walnut, poplar, and oak—and its gardens and fruit trees offer a pleasant contrast to the stark slopes bearing down from above. Its houses of roughly cut stone rise in uneven tiers, huddled against the slope and shaded by the trees. It was in one of these humble dwellings with its tiny windows and sagging straw roof that Said Nursi was born in 1877,1 the fourth of seven children. His father, called Mirza, had a smallholding of land, similar no doubt to the small terraced plots still cultivated today. His birthplace, too, stands unchanged, inhabited by distant relatives. Mirza was also known as Sufi Mirza, to denote either his attachment to a Sufi order or his piety,2 while his wife was Nuriye—or, more correctly according to one biographer, Nure or Nura.3 They were among the settled Kurdish population of the geographical region the Ottomans called Kurdistan .4 In Nursi’s words, his family was an ordinary one and could boast no illustrious forebears.5 According to some reports, Mirza’s generation was the fourth descended from two brothers who had been sent from Cizre on the Tigris to preach in the area.6 It is conceivable that they were members of the Kha\lidiyyah branch of the Naqshbandê order, which spread rapidly through the area in the nineteenth century,7 though this would have meant that Mirza was at most the second generation. Nuriye was from the village of Bilkan, some three hours’ distance from Nurs. The two eldest children of the family were girls, Dürriye and Hanım. The latter later gained a reputation for her knowledge of religion and married another hoja (teacher) who bore the same name as her brother, Molla Said. They went into voluntary exile in Damascus following the Bitlis Incident of 1913, and died while circumambulating the Ka‘bah in 1945.8 The next child, 3 C H A P T E R 1 Childhood and Youth Abdullah, also a hoja, was the young Said’s first teacher. He died in Nurs in 1914. Said was followed by Molla Mehmed, who taught in the medrese (religious school) in the village of Arvas,9 not far from Nurs. Then came Abdülmecid , who for many years studied under his elder brother, Said. His main claim to fame was his translation into Turkish of two of Nursi’s Arabic works. He died in Konya in 1967. Nothing is known of the youngest member of the family , a girl called Mercan (Ar. Marja\n). The eldest girl, Dürriye, the mother of Ubeyd, also a student of Said, was drowned in the river at Nurs when Ubeyd was small. Mirza died in the 1920s and was buried in the Nurs graveyard. Once Said left the family home to pursue his studies, he never again saw his mother. She died during the First World War and was also buried in Nurs. In later years, Said was to say: “From my mother I learnt compassion, and from my father orderliness and regularity.” Said passed his early years with his family in Nurs. Long winters were spent in the village, and short summers in the higher pastures or in the gardens along the low slopes and riverbanks in the valley bottom. The growing season was short, but sufficient to meet the villagers’ needs. It was a life close to the natural world, in harmony with its rhythms and cycles, full of wonders for an aware and responsive child like Said. He was unusually intelligent, always investigating things, questioning and seeking answers. Years later when explaining how scholarly metaphors may degenerate into superstition “when they fall into the hands of the ignorant,” he himself described an occasion that illustrates this. One night, on hearing tin cans being clashed together and a rifle being fired, the family rushed out of the house to find there was...

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