Introduction

If, by spirituality, one means the sense of direct communion with God, the Muslim tradition includes a whole world of meaning beyond the formal profession of belief in God and external submission to God’s laws: even a cursory study of the Quran will reveal that it addresses, first and foremost, the question of man’s relationship with his Creator, and how the human soul and spirit must respond to the questions that such a relationship poses. The creation of human beings took place not merely so that they should affirm the existence of a Creator and bow down to His laws through various rites and rituals: God is not merely a principle that is to be accepted, or a giver of laws who is to be obeyed. While the God of the Quran is infinite, absolute, theoretically unfathomable and ultimately unreachable in the very real sense of those terms, He can be understood through His creation and, more importantly, His reality can be gradually ‘uncovered’ by man, who is able to approach God and become ever more aware of what He is simply by virtue of the fact that he is created in imago Dei, or in the image of God.

In Nursi’s cosmology, man is the reflection whose purpose in life is to perceive and understand the Reflected. For him, therefore, spirituality is not about becoming more Godlike. In fact it is the very reverse. It is about realising that those attributes in man which appear to make him like a god belong in reality to another. The journey of man towards God, then, is not about becoming more like Him. It is about man’s ‘purifying’ himself of all possible claims to ‘Godlikeness’ and making room for God to reveal Himself through man. It means not acting like Him, but acting in His name; it involves not being like Him, but manifesting or revealing Him. For that to happen, one has to clear out the ‘clutter of the self ‘ – the imaginary ownership one exercises over one’s own attributes – so that His ‘image’ may be reflected in the mirror of the soul. In the Quranic worldview, God is the Ground of all being, the One who created man to be His ‘vicegerent’ or representative on earth, in order that man should know, love and worship Him. And in order to know God, man must first solve the mystery of his own existence. For, according to the Prophetic Tradition: