Mustafa Tuna, “At the Vanguard of Contemporary Muslim Thought: Reading Said Nursî into the Islamic Tradition.” Journal of Islamic Studies, 2017 28(3).

ABSTRACT: Despite his growing renown as a Kurdish-origin scholar of Islam from post-Ottoman Turkey, academia and the transregional networks of Islamic scholarship rarely engage the content of Said Nursî's (1878-1960) innovative works (Risale-i Nur). To the background of various historical and cultural circumstances that produce such intellectual peripherality, this article suggests that Nursî's system of theological contemplation (tafakkur) expands the limits of Muslim religious thought from within the Sunni Islamic tradition, by incorporating aspects of the Muslim creed that have conventionally been substantiated based on textual evidence (samʿiyyāt) into the realm of rational argumentation (ʿaqliyyāt) and by bolstering the place of contemplation in Sufi practice.