Introduction

Having explored in the opening chapter some of Nursi’s arguments for the necessary existence (wujūb al-wujūd) and unity (waḥda) of the Creator, we now shift the focus from God to that which is considered to be ‘other than God’, namely the cosmos and all of the entities which comprise it. Our objective is to understand how Nursi accounts for the phenomenon of being itself. Why do things exist rather than not exist? How are we to understand creation and the created realm, and what ontological status do creatures have? And how is the existence of the cosmos to whose being we attest related to the existence of the One purported to have brought it into being? Among the treatises which comprise the Risale-i Nur, none is dedicated solely to the question of existence and created beings, but there is enough material on the subject scattered throughout the various parts of his work for us to construct a reasonably accurate picture of how Nursi understood these issues.

If God exists, created beings must exist

As we have seen in Chapter One, in arguing for the necessary existence and unity of God, Nursi begins by looking first at the evidence ‘in the self and on the horizons’: by reading the vast ‘book of creation’, he says, one infers from the myriad signs and indications scattered therein that it has an Author. In short, the arguments marshalled by Nursi to support his notion of one, necessarily existing God move from effect to cause, from the notion of created beings to the notion of a Creator.

To explain why beings other than God exist, however, Nursi moves on to what for him and other mystic-theologians like him must have appeared to be much firmer ground. For having established to his own satisfaction the necessary existence and unity of God, he is now able to argue from cause to effect, which he does when answering the question, “Why do things exist?”