A passage from The Flashes book of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Great schoolar of Turkey) Years of the Armenian attacks..
The Flashes
The Twenty-Sixth Flash
THIRTEENTH HOPE:
In this Hope I shall describe an important scene from the course of my life; it is bound to be somewhat lengthy, so I hope you will not become bored or offended.
After being saved from captivity in Russia during the Great War, service of religion in the Darό’l-Hikmet kept me in Istanbul for two or three years. Then through the guidance of the All-Wise Qur’an and spiritual influence of Ghawth al-A’zam and the awakening of old age, I felt a weariness at the civilized life of Istanbul and a disgust at its glittering social life. A feeling of longing for my native land drove me there, and thinking, since I am bound to die, let me die in my own country, I went to Van.
Before everything, I went to visit my medrese in Van, the Horhor. I saw that the Armenians had razed it during the Russian occupation, like the rest of the buildings of Van. It was right under and adjacent to Van’s famous citadel, which is a great monolith like a mountain. My true friends, brothers, and close students of the medrese were embodied before my eyes. Some of those self-sacrificing friends of mine had become actual martyrs, while others had died due to that calamity had become in effect martyrs.
I could not restrain myself from weeping. I climbed to the top of the citadel which overlooking the medrese, towers above it to the height of two minarets, and I sat down. I went back in my imagination seven or eight years. Having a powerful imagination, I wandered all around that time in my mind. There was no one around to distract me from those imaginings and draw me back from that time. For I was alone. As my view of those seven or eight years expanded, I saw enough to fill a century. I saw that the town at the foot of the citadel had been completely burnt and destroyed. I looked on it so sadly it was as though from the time I had seen it before to when I was then seeing it two hundred years had passed. Most of the people of those houses had been my friends and acquaintances. The majority of them had died in the migrations, may God have mercy on them, or had gone to a wretched exile. Apart from the Armenian quarter, all the Muslim houses of Van had been levelled. My heart was lacerated. I was so affected that if I had had a thousand eyes, they would have all wept together. I had returned to my homeland from exile; I had supposed that I had been saved from exile. But alas! the most lamentable exile I experienced in my homeland. I saw that hundreds of my students and friends to whom I had been closely attached, like Abdurrahman in the Twelfth Hope, had entered the grave and that their places were all ruins.
There were some lines that had long been in my mind but I had not understood their true meaning. Now before that sad scene I understood their meaning completely. The lines were these: “If there was no separation from friends, death could find no way to our spirits so that it might take them.”24 That is to say, what kills man most is separation from those he loves. Yes, nothing had caused me as much suffering and sorrow as that situation. If assistance had not come from the Qur’an and from belief, my grief and sorrow and suffering would have made my spirit fly away.
Since early times in their verses, poets have lamented the destruction with time of the places they have been together with their beloveds. And I had seen this in most painful form with my own eyes. With the sorrow of someone passing by the dwellings of beloved friends after two hundred years, my heart and spirit joined my eyes and they all wept together. Then one by one the happy scenes of the life I had passed for nearly twenty years in study with my valuable students, when the places which were now in ruins before my eyes were flourishing and happy, sprang to life before me like pictures at the cinema, then died away and vanished. This continued before the eye of my imagination for some time.
Then I felt astonished at the state of the worldly, how is it that they deceive themselves? For the situation there showed clearly that this world is transitory and that human beings are guests within it. I saw with my own eyes how true the constantly repeated words of the people of reality: “The world is cruel, treacherous, bad; do not be deceived by it!” I also saw that just as man is connected with his own body and household, so is he also connected with his town, his country, indeed with the world. For while weeping with my two eyes at the pitifulness of old age in respect of my body, I want to weep with ten eyes not only at my medrese’s old age, but at its death. And I felt the need to weep with a hundred eyes at the half-death of my beautiful homeland.
It states in a Hadith that every morning an angel calls out: “You are born to die, and construct buildings that they may be destroyed.” I was hearing this truth not with my ears, but with my eyes.
Ten years later I still weep when I imagine that situation, in the same way that it made me weep at that time. Yes, the ruins of the houses at the foot of the ancient citadel, thousands of years old, and the town ageing eight years in eight hundred years, and the death of my medrese, which had flourished and been the gathering-place of friends, all indicated the vastness of the immaterial corpse of all the medreses in the Ottoman Empire, which had died; the great monolith of Van’s citadel had become a gravestone to all of them. It was as though my students who had been together with me in the medrese eight years previously were weeping in their graves together with me. Indeed the ruined walls of the town and its scattered stones were weeping together with me. I saw them to be weeping.
Then I understood that I could not endure this exile in my native land. I thought that I would either have to join them in the grave, or withdraw into a cave in the mountains and await my death there. I told myself: “These unendurable, searing separations which break patience and resistance surely make death preferable to life. The pains of life such as this cannot be borne.”
I then cast a glance over the six aspects and saw them all to be black. The heedlessness arising from my intense grief showed me the world to be terrifying, empty, desolate, and about to collapse over my head. My spirit sought a point of support in the face of innumerable hostile calamities. Its endless desires which stretch to eternity were seeking out something to satisfy them. While awaiting consolation in the face of the sorrow and grief arising from those endless separations and deaths, that endless devastation, suddenly the reality was manifested of the All-Wise Qur’an’s verses:
Whatever is in the heavens and on earth—let it declare the praises and glory of God; for He is Exalted in Might, the Wise. * To Him belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth: it is He Who gives life and death; and He has power over all things.
It saved me from that pitiful, terrible, sad, separation-stained imagining, and opened my eyes. I saw that the fruits at the tops of the fruit-trees were looking at me as though smiling. “Note us as well,” they were saying. “Do not only look at the ruins.” The verses’ reality brought the following thought to mind:
“Why does an artificial letter written in the form of a town by the hand of man, who is a guest on the page of Van’s plain, being wiped out by a calamitous torrent called the Russian invasion sadden you to this extent? Consider the Pre-Eternal Inscriber, everything’s True Owner and Sustainer, for His missives on this page of Van continue to be written in glittering fashion, in the way you used to see. Your weeping over those desolate ruins arises from the error of forgetting their True Owner, not thinking that men are guests, and imagining them to be owner.”
A door to reality opened up from that error, from that searing sight, and my soul was prepared to accept the reality completely. Like iron is plunged in the fire so that it softens and may be profited from, that grievous sight and terrible state were fire which softened my soul. Through the reality of the above verses, the Qur’an of Miraculous Exposition showed it the effulgence of the truths of belief, causing it to accept it.
Yes, all thanks be to God, as is proved conclusively in parts of the Risale-i Nur like the Twentieth Letter, through the effulgence of belief in God, the reality of the verses gives a point of support to the spirit and heart which unfolds in relation to everyone’s strength of belief. This was so powerful it afforded me a strength that could have confronted calamities a hundred times more dreadful than the situation I saw. It uttered this reminder: “Everything is subjected to the command of the True Owner of this country, your Creator. The reins of all things are in His hands. Your relation with Him is sufficient.”
(...)
Source:
http://www.uhuvvetgr.org/gr/popup.php?yazid=38
