When Greek philosophical texts were rendered into Arabic as part of the famed ‘translation movement’ during the Abbasid era, sophia (‘metaphysical truth’ or ‘wisdom’) and phronesis (‘prudence’) were both translated using the same term, ḥikma (‘wisdom’), for what are basically two distinct Aristotelian concepts. For Aristotle, sophia is related to deliberating upon the world and trying to understand why it is the way it is. Sophia is about universal truths and eternal principles, whereas phronesis is personal and experiential: it is about thinking how and why one should act to change things – our own lives, especially – for the better. That the two terms should have been conflated in the course of their translation into the Arabic term ḥikma (‘wisdom’) is not altogether unsurprising, for ḥikma covers both the theoretical wisdom represented by sophia and the practical wisdom involved in phronesis. To enhance definitional precision, however, we will use the term phronesis to describe the kind of practical wisdom employed by Said Nursi in a number of treatises written as guides on how to meet the difficult, everyday challenges of life – imprisonment, for example, or the death of a child – within an overall framework of belief and submission constructed by orthodox Muslim theology, albeit as seen through Nursian eyes.

In On Virtues and Vices, attributed to Aristotle, phronesis is defined as the “wisdom to take counsel, to judge the goods and evils and all the things in life that are desirable and to be avoided, to use all the available goods finely, to behave rightly in society, to observe due occasions, to employ both speech and action with sagacity, to have expert knowledge of all things that are useful”. In short, phronesis as outlined by Aristotle denotes the art of what in Nursian terms could arguably be described as a kind of theological counselling which appeals to the instinctual soul in order to save it from its own defects, particularly when the soul is subject to the various pressures that arise as a result of the tribulations that go with being human.