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In November 1907 Nursi set off for Istanbul with the intention of obtaining official support and backing for his Islamic university, the Medresetü’z-Zehra\. He was now around thirty years of age. From his humble beginnings in the village of Nurs, he had established his reputation among the ulama of Kurdistan and was a figure well known not only for his unbeaten record in debate, extensive learning, and extraordinary abilities, but also for his pursuit of justice and defense of right, and his absolute fearlessness before anyone save his Maker. His ambitions matched his ability. This had marked him out from his earliest years. He had never been content with the status quo; something within himself had perpetually pushed him to seek fresh, new, better paths. As his horizons expanded, his path became clearer. As is described in the previous chapter, besides the continuing process of his study, several events were decisive in giving him direction. One was his learning of what he perceived to be the severe nature of the threats to the Qur’a\n and Islam and his decision to dedicate his life and learning to proving them to be the source of true knowledge and progress. Another was the acquaintances he made in Mardin in 1892 and his learning through them of the struggle for freedom and constitutionalism, and of the movement for Islamic unity and other issues concerning the Islamic world. But what had the profoundest influence on him was his mixing with the government officials in Van, which made him realize the extent to which the Westernization and secularization of the Tanzimat had affected the thinking and views of the Ottoman educated classes, giving rise to many doubts about Islam. Influenced by Europeans, some had even come to believe that Islam was responsible for the empire’s backwardness. This had brought home to Nursi the urgent necessity of reforming medrese education and updating the Islamic sciences in the light of modern advances in knowledge. Until the beginning of the First World War, it was with these issues that he was chiefly concerned. The Tanzimat and Constitutional Movement The Tanzimat is the name given to the period (1839–76) during which, largely under European pressure and advice, the Ottoman sultans and their leading 33 C H A P T E R 2 Istanbul ministers introduced a series of reforms by which they intended, by reordering the government, administration, and many areas of Ottoman life along Western lines, to restore the empire’s fast-declining power and deliver it from subjection to Europe.1 In fact, the Tanzimat solved none of the empire’s immediate problems, but it did set the future course of Turkish history. Here it is mentioned chiefly in respect of several matters that contributed to the emergence of the Constitutional Movement, whose proponents put forward alternative solutions. The introduction of Western-style reforms, in many cases alongside the existing system, resulted in the separation of the religious and worldly functions of the state, which had previously been symbolically fused in the person of the sultan-caliph.2 Notwithstanding this step toward secularization and the attendant neglect of religious institutions and the displacement of Islam from the center of life, the upper echelons of the ulama supported the reforms.3 It was the lower ranks and medrese students that remained fiercely hostile to them.4 Another factor breeding opposition was that by both granting equality to the Christian minorities and protecting their interests as independent millets (religious communities ), the reforms greatly strengthened the minorities’ economic and political positions at the expense of the Muslim majority of the empire. Other developments , such as the increase rather than decrease in the sultan’s autocratic authority, also fueled opposition to the reforms. Also relevant was the influx of Western ideas that accompanied the reforms. The new secular schools greatly increased the teaching of European languages, particularly French, and often involved the sending of students to Europe, both of which expedited the flow of contemporary European ideas into the Ottoman Empire. As the downward slide of the empire under the overwhelming pressures of Europe continued despite the Tanzimat reforms, a group of intellectuals and writers emerged who in the newly established press started to voice criticisms of the reforms and the statesmen who had introduced them. The ideas they strove to publicize as alternative solutions for the empire’s crisis were centered on the concepts of freedom and constitutional government. The most prominent member of this...

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