Said Nursi as Ab al-Waqt, the Father of His Time - Kerim Balci - Risale Academy Series

In this second program we will discuss the relevance of the Epistles of Light for a better understanding of the times Bediuzzaman Said Nursi lived in. Said Nursi lived through various revolutionary changes in the late Ottoman and early Republican history. As is with all texts written by mortal human beings, his texts are a product of his time. The intellectual discussions, cultural and political cleavages of his time can be traced in the Epistles of Light also. On the other hand, Nursi’s analysis of the problems of the Islamic World and the solutions he proposed seems to have passed the test of time. In this sence Nursi is not only a product of the cultural millieu he was born into, but he is also a producer of a new culture. Nursi managed to forge a metalanguage, an idiom that reestablished the bond between faith and science, between tradition and modernity and between theology and everyday. In this second episode we will deal largely with the practical theology Nursi founded whereby everyday became a playground of miracles, wonderworks and dialogue with the Unseen. We will also touch upon the implications of the style, rich in metaphors and other literary devices, in liberating the Epistles of Light from the boundaries of its cultural milieu.

Program date: July 4, 2021
Day: Sunday
Time: 4 PM (New York - EST)
Houston - 3 PM
California - 1 PM
England - 21.00
Germany, France, Egypt - 22.00
Sydney: 06.00 (Next day)

Distinguished speaker of the program: Kerim Balci
Moderator: Dr. Zuleyha Colak

KERIM BALCI is a Turkish writer, journalist, academic and human rights activist. He is recently the Chief Advisor of London Based Human Rights Solidarity and works as a communication officer at London Advocacy, a litigation based human rights advocacy firm. Balci served as the editor in chief of Turkish Review, and as a columnist at Today’s Zaman and Zaman dailies before these publications were shuttered by the Turkish government.
Balci studied his BA in Physics and Political Science at Bogazici University of Turkey, his MA in Islam and Modern Middle East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his PhD on linguistics at Durham University of the UK. He is currently an LLM student at Leeds Law School of the UK. He lectures at the Respect Graduate School on topics like Islamic logic, epistemology and hermeneutics.

DR. ZULEYHA COLAK is a Senior Lecturer and coordinator of Turkish and Ottoman Language program at Middle Eastern Studies department at Columbia University. Previously she taught at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis in Global Studies department between 2005-2010. She received her B. A. in Arabic Language and Literature from Istanbul University, Turkey (1998). She holds two masters’ degrees, one in comparative literature in Arabic Literature in Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey (2000), and one in Central Eurasian Studies/Ottoman and Modern Turkish studies at Indiana University (2003). Her Ph. D dissertation is on the portrayal of Women of Biblical and Quranic Joseph Story from Indiana University in 2010. She has been a board member at Respect Graduate school in Bethlehem, PA and voluntarily teaching courses on Islam. Some courses are Islam 101, Who is Muhammad? and recently a graduate course on Essentials of Islamic Spirituality.

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