The Damascus Sermon

 

In the Name of God, the Merciful,

the Compassionate.

 

We too offer the praise and thanks and gifts that all animate creatures offer through the tongues of their beings and lives to their Creator, the Necessarily Existent One, Who said:

Do not despair of God’s mercy.1

And never-ending blessings and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad the Elect of God (Upon whom blessings and peace), who said:

“I came to perfect morality.”2

That is, “An important reason for my being sent to mankind by Almighty God was to perfect good conduct and morality, and deliver mankind from immorality and vice.”

Having offered praise to God and sought His blessings for His Messenger, I say this: O my Arab brothers who are listening here in the Umayyad Mosque! I have not mounted this pulpit, which is far above my station, in order to guide you, for to teach you is beyond my authority. I am like a child before this gathering, among whom are close on a hundred religious scholars, who goes to school in the morning and learns his lesson, then in the evening returns and repeats it to his father. His father sees whether or not what the child has learnt is correct, and the child awaits either approval or guidance from him. Yes, we are like children before you, and we are your students. You are our masters, and the masters of the other Muslim nations. I shall therefore repeat to you, our masters, part of the lesson I have learnt. It is as follows:

In the conditions of the present time in these lands, I have learnt a lesson in the school of mankind’s social life and I have realized that what has allowed foreigners, Europeans, to fly towards the future on progress while it arrested us and kept us, in respect of material development, in the Middle Ages, are six dire sicknesses. The sicknesses are these:

FIRSTLY: The rising to life of despair and hopelessness in social life.

SECONDLY: The death of truthfulness in social and political life.

THIRDLY: Love of enmity.

FOURTHLY: Not knowing the luminous bonds that bind the believers to one another.

FIFTHLY: Despotism, which spreads, becoming widespread as though it was various contagious diseases.

SIXTHLY: Restricting endeavour to what is personally beneficial.

I shall explain, by means of six ‘Words,’ the lesson I have learnt from the pharmacy of the Qur’an, which is like a faculty of medicine. This lesson constitutes the medicine to cure our social life of those six dire sicknesses.

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1. Qur'an, 39:53.

2. 'Ajluni, Kashf al-Khafa, i, 211.

 

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi