Introduction

“I take refuge in God,” Said Nursi once said famously, “from Satan and from politics.” This enigmatic utterance is often cited as incontrovertible evidence of Nursi’s uncompromising aversion to all things political, signalling the apoliticism that is seen by many as one of the defining characteristics of the movement which grew up around his teachings in the Risale-i Nur. Yet as even the most cursory glances at his biography will reveal, Nursi was no stranger to engagement with politics and political issues; indeed, as we shall see, the way he himself divided his life into three ideational and developmental stages – namely the ‘Old Said’, the ‘New Said’ and the ‘Third Said’ – was to a certain extent informed by the different approaches that he adopted towards politics throughout his life. Why, then, the decision to take refuge in God? Which aspect of politics and political life was so abhorrent to Nursi that, by combining it with Satan to form what almost amounts to a concept pair, he was moved to deem it on a par with the demonic?

The definition of the word ‘politics’ is notoriously vague and therefore highly contested. It has been argued that as a general concept, politics boils down to the techniques employed in directing or administering states or other political units; however, this is probably too broad a definition for our present task, which is to identify precisely the kind of activity or set of behaviours – seemingly on the same level as the Devil as far as its inherent perniciousness is concerned - from which Nursi declared that he had taken refuge.

There are two other relatively broad but less unwieldy definitions which may serve our purpose here. The first, to quote Edward Banfield, focuses on ‘actors who are oriented towards the attainment of ends.’When those actors pursue ends or objectives that conflict, an ‘issue’ comes into being. Politics is the technique through which that issue is either settled or worsened, be it by negotiation, argumentation, discussion, diplomacy, persuasion or, in extreme but all too familiar cases, the application of brute force. A shorter, but not dissimilar, definition of politics is that it is ‘the struggle among actors pursuing conflicting desires on public issues.’ The main difference is that the first identifies politics as technique while the second focuses on politics as struggle. Another difference is that the first does not actually spell out which kind of issues are political, while the second definition specifies that those issues must be ‘public’. Again, what constitutes a ‘public’ issue is also open to serious question, although it is safe to say that whatever the term public actually covers, it almost certainly includes issues which pertain to ‘group policy, group organisation, group leadership, or the conduct or regulation of intergroup relationships’.