The Thirteenth Word

An important matter

I will explain briefly a comprehensive truth that occurred to my heart on Laylatu’l-Qadr (the Night of Power and Destiny).60 The Second World War was a display of extreme tyranny and injustice that entailed ruthless destruction. Countless innocent people were ruined due to one criminal. The defeated were led to awesome despair, while the victors worried about keeping their supremacy. Many suffer ghastly pangs of conscience because they could not repair the destruction they caused. The war showed just how transitory worldly life is, how deceitful modern civilization’s frivolities are. The war gravely and extensively damaged human nature’s essence and exalted potential. In some places, heedlessness, misguidance, and gross naturalism have been smashed by the Qur’an’s diamond sword, while it has unveiled the extreme ugliness and cruelty of the true face of world politics, the most extensive, suffocating, and deceiving reflection of heedlessness and misguidance.

All this proves that since the worldly life, of which humanity is enamored, is ugly and transitory, human true, conscious nature will search with all its strength for eternal life, for which it truly yearns and loves. Signs have already appeared in the North, the West, and the United States. The Qur’an of miraculous exposition, which has had countless students for over thirteen centuries, every truth of which has been confirmed by innumerable truthful scholars, and which has remained alive in the minds of millions of its memorizers with all its holiness, teaches and proclaims the eternal life, explicitly or implicitly, in many of its powerful, striking, and reiterated verses. It instructs people in its particular tongues and, in a way unmatched by any other book, conveys the good news of eternal life and everlasting happiness, healing all our wounds. Given this, and provided that humanity does not lose its ability to reason or suffer complete physical or spiritual destruction, the vast masses and great states will search out the Qur’an of miraculous exposition. Having perceived its truths, they will become devoted to it heart and soul, just as some famous preachers in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and England, and a significant community in the United States in quest of the true religion, have shown an inclination to accept it. This will take place because the Qur’an has no equal, and nothing can take the place of this greatest miracle.

We also may say that among many other useful books and compilations, the Risale-i Nur has performed a service like a diamond sword in the hand of this Greatest Miracle, and that it silences even its most stubborn enemies. Having originated in the Qur’an, the Risale-i Nur explains and offers the Qur’anic truths in a way that enlightens the mind, soul, and feelings. It heals those wounded by modern trends, and defeats heretics and their anti-Qur’an propaganda. Many of its treatises, such as “The Treatise of Nature,” “The Staff of Moses,” and “The Fruits of Belief,” have smashed naturalism and scientific materialism, the most formidable fortification of misguidance. They have banished heedlessness in its most dense, suffocating, and extensive dimensions, all of which evolved under the broad veil of scientism, by demonstrating the light of Divine Unity in a most radiant fashion.

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi

60 Laylatu’l-Qadr, to which the Qur’an refers in 97:1-5, is the most sacred night of the year. According to the majority of scholars, it is the 27th night of Ramadan. The Qur’an says concerning it: Laylatu’l-Qadr is better than a thousand months. The angels and the Spirit descend in it by the permission of their Lord with His decrees for every affair—being a pure mercy and security, being until the rise of the dawn. (97:3-5) (Tr.)