Kurdish-born Ottoman and Turkish religious scholar, author of the Risale-i Nur, who in his early years wrote Qızıl Ījāz, a very compressed Arabic commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam with its own family of glosses.
Life
Said Nursi was born in the village of Nurs, in the district of Hizan near Bitlis, early in 1878 (1295) according to his own curriculum vitae, as quoted by the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. He began his education with his brother Abdullah and in the madrasas of the region, and received his licence (icâzet) from Şeyh Muhammed Celâlî in Doğubayazıt in 1892, at about fourteen. In Siirt, according to the TDV, Molla Fethullah Efendi tested his memory and gave him the title Bediüzzaman, ‘wonder of the age’. His later work, above all the Risale-i Nur collection, much of it written during eight years at Barla (1926–1934), lies outside logic. He died in Urfa on 23 March 1960, having been moved there from Emirdağ at his own request.
His contribution to logic belongs to his early, Arabic period. The TDV mentions notes on Gelenbevî’s al-Burhān and a treatise on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam, printed in the collection Āsār-ı Bedīʿiyye. The latter is Qızıl Ījāz (Kızıl İcaz, ‘the red concision’), a commentary on the Sullam so compressed that it needed explanation itself. Mehmet Salih Geçit describes how his brother Molla Abdülmecid Nursi and Molla Sadreddin Yüksel wrote glosses (taʿlīqāt) on it, and how Molla Musa Celâlî gathered these with his own into a single book (Istanbul 2009); Turkish translations followed. The work and its glosses show that the Sullam was studied in the Kurdish madrasas of eastern Anatolia.
Uncertain or disputed
- Year of birth: 1878 in the TDV text, after his own CV; one bibliography entry gives 1873.
- When and where Qızıl Ījāz was written is not stated in the sources consulted, beyond its belonging to his early period; the place of the 1339 printing (Evkāf Matbaası, presumably Istanbul) is not given by Geçit.
Works
- Qızıl Ījāz (Kızıl İcaz) قِزِلْ إِيجَاز — atas al-Sullam al-munawraqConcise Arabic commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam; printed by the Evkāf Matbaası in 1339/1920–21 (Geçit’s bibliography), and again in 1385/1965; edition by Ahmet Akgündüz (2019) and Turkish translations (2020), as recorded in the Sullam catalogue.syarah
- Taʿlīqāt on Gelenbevî’s al-BurhānNotes on the late Ottoman logic handbook, printed in Āsār-ı Bedīʿiyye (TDV).ta'liqat
- Risale-i Nur KülliyatıHis main collection (Sözler, Mektûbât, Lem‘alar, Şualar), not on logic.karya
Reception
Qızıl Ījāz became the centre of a small ‘commentary family’ in the eastern Anatolian madrasas: the glosses of Molla Abdülmecid Nursi and Molla Sadreddin Yüksel, collected with Molla Musa Celâlî’s own as Taʿlīqāt ʿalā Qızıl Ījāz (Sembol, Istanbul 2009).
Sources (2)