Revivification of Educational System: A Life Long Struggle of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi

Abstract

Education is such a crucial element of a society that plays a vital role in building characters, behavior and ideology of a nation. The failure to develop this element rightly and according to indispensable requirements of time may result in the decline or ultimately the collapse of a society. Accordingly, every great scholar and intellectual in human history for instance Plato, Confucius, John Locke, Rousseau, [i] as well Muslim scholars i.e. Al-Ghazali, Farabi and Ibne Khaldun etc. has given special attention to this building block of society. Bediuzzaman Said Nursi also expended all his efforts for the reforming of education system during his whole life. Having considered educational backwardness the main cause of Ottoman Muslim’s decline, Nursi got the opinion of making necessary reforms in this area. His biography indicates that due to his remarkable foresight he understood the problem of education system of his time at a very early age, while kept on moving from one madrassah to the other restlessly.[ii] The reason of his unrest in early five years, that he could not stay longer in any madrassah, was his discontent with education system. Moreover his three months stay in Sheikh Jalali’s madrassah in Dogubayazit[iii] in the city of Agri in Turkey, his study through self-selection of particular texts from course books, and his reply to his amazed teacher, “The treasures (of learning) you control are in a strongbox. You have its key. What I need is a clue to its contents. I will choose whatever I find appropriate”[iv] all illustrates his dissatisfaction with the education system of his day.

[i]         William Cooney, Charles Cross, and Barry Trunk, From Plato to Piaget: The Greatest Educational Theorists from across the Centuries and around the World (University Press of America, 1993).

[ii]        For details see Sukran Vahide, Islam in Modern Turkey: An Intellectual Biography of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 6-10.

[iii]       When he commenced his studies with serious effort and got diploma in just 3 months at the h of Sheikh Jelali, here the method he adopted for learning was not thorough study of whole works; rather he selected certain texts and took a general study of all. And when his teacher asked him the reason of doing so, he replied in this way.

[iv]        Serif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 68.