Risale-i Nur Collection 

The Short Words comprises the first ten chapters of
the thirty-three-chapter work known as The Words,
which in turn forms the first part of the Risale-i
Nur (Epistles of Light) collection, a commentary on
the Quran that totals in excess of six thousand pages.
The Risale-i Nur was written in Turkish by one of the
modern age’s most significant Muslim scholars,
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1876-1960). Nursi wrote
this monumental work in order to explain the truths
and realities of belief, both to his fellow Muslims and
to modern humankind in general. In Nursi’s view, we
are in this modern age confronted by a profound
crisis of meaning, and in the face of the assaults of
materialist philosophies and ideologies, the question
which must be prioritised over all others for Muslims
is the saving and strengthening of belief. For it is only
in belief in the Creator, the Source of all being, that
humankind’s true happiness and progress, and the
cure for the wounds caused by materialism and
misguidance, are to be found. Nursi devoted a whole
life of learning and scholarship to realising these
aims.
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s treatise The Short
Words are presented here in its new English translation with a focus on the communication of
meaning rather than on strict, word-for-word
equivalence, which often obscures what the author is
trying to say and makes reading more of a task for the
reader than a pleasure.
The Short Words are, as the title suggests, short,
simple, reader-friendly pieces describing, through
the use of comparisons, metaphors and analogies, the
virtues of belief and worshipful action. The Short
Words showcase Nursi’s own unique style of
instruction through short, accessible parables on the
relative merits and demerits of guidance and
misguidance and belief and unbelief, pointing out
how alien to human nature the rejection and denial of
God really are, and showing how humankind’s true
happiness and progress can be found only in
recognition, acceptance and worship of the Maker of
the universe, and in worshipful action on His account.
Colin Turner
Durham, March 2021