Introduction

Causation, or, more precisely, the necessity and efficacy of the causal nexus, is the subject of one of the most vigorously contested debates in the history of Muslim theological and philosophical thought. When fire touches paper, and paper ignites, is the fire the cause of the ignition, or is the effect – namely the flames which consume the paper – produced directly by God? The Ash’arite theologians were arguably the first to deny the existence of a necessary connection between cause and effect independently of God, who, as ‘Causer of causes’ (musabbib al-asbāb), they argued, creates all effects directly. Later, Ghazālī championed the Ash’arite cause in his anti-Peripatetic tract, Tahāfut al-falāsifa. Predating David Hume by several centuries, but for distinctly different reasons, Ghazālī proposed that the network of cause and effect of which we are all part is in fact only apparent: it is a human construct created out of the habit we have of linking events which always appear to occur together, such as the striking of the match, the touching of the match to paper, the ignition of the paper and its subsequent consumption by the flames. Ghazālī argued that to claim that the fire is the real cause of the paper’s being reduced to ashes is to cast a slur on God’s omnipotence and sovereignty. If causes actually possess the potency and duration needed to bring an effect into being, the role of God becomes virtually redundant, and His status is reduced to that of ‘First Cause’ or ‘Prime Mover’ in the truly Peripatetic sense of the term, with a nominal sovereignty similar to that of modern-day constitutional monarchs, who are kings and queens of all they survey in name alone.

Said Nursi’s approach to the question of causation appears to be informed to a certain extent by the teachings of the Ash’arite theologians and Ghazālī, whose attack on Peripatetic philosophy was articulated to a certain extent in their own language and on their terms. Nursi’s motivation, too, was something that he shared with his ideological predecessor. Unlike the Ash’arites, whose sole objective seems to have been their desire to save Divine sovereignty from the onslaught of the philosophers, Ghazālī’s endeavours – including his debunking of the Peripatetics – were underpinned by a resolute intention to revive true belief among the Muslim masses. Eight centuries later, Nursi was moved to echo Ghazālī’s teachings on causation for almost identical reasons. By Nursi’s time, of course, the goalposts had now changed, and the old adversary of Peripatetic philosophy had been joined by what Nursi claimed was one of its ideological descendants, scientific materialism. Founded on the premise of causal efficacy, scientific materialism was believed by Nursi to be the major threat to the belief of Muslims at the outset of the twentieth century. His rejection of the claims of scientific materialism runs like a thread throughout the Risale, but finds its most vigorous expression in a treatise he wrote in the 1920s entitled Treatise On Nature (Tabiat Risalesi). The main focus of the work is Nursi’s rejection of the notion that material beings can give existence to other material beings, or, to use the language of science and philosophy, that ‘causes’ can actually bring about ‘effects’. And it is this treatise which forms the basis for discussion in the present chapter.