Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life

Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life

Michael Birkel
Earlham School of Religion, USA

Abstract
Although they almost certainly never heard of one another, Said Nursi and
Rufus Jones were contemporaneous mystics and leaders of spiritual renewal
in their respective Muslim and Quaker communities. A comparison of their
writings reveals a high correspondence of thought on the spiritual life: a
sense of awe, a sacramental view of life in which God is available to all
and a democratisation of the mystical life. This in turn inspires a pluralistic
appreciation of God’s mystical presence in other religious communities, even
as one acknowledges the distinctive truth of one’s own. For each writer, this
process opened a path to respond to the challenges of modernity in the early
twentieth century.

Keywords
Rufus M. Jones, Said Nursi, interfaith dialogue, mysticism, Quakerism, Islam

Said Nursi1 and Rufus Jones2 were contemporaneous mystics and leaders of
spiritual renewal in their respective Muslim and Quaker communities. A

1 Said Nursi is not yet well known outside of (mostly Turkish) Muslim circles. I first
learned of him through conversation with Zeki Saritoprak, then through Salih Sayilgan
and Zeyneb Sayilgan. This essay grows out of a paper that I delivered to a conference on
Said Nursi at the kind invitation of Ian Markham. I express my gratitude to all these Said
Nursi scholars.
2 The bibliography of Rufus Jones is considerable. See Bernet, C., Rufus Jones
(1863–1948), Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 137–46. Elizabeth Gray Vining’s
biography (Vining, E. G., Friend of Life: the biography of Rufus M. Jones, London: Michael
Joseph, 1959) remains eminently useful. Leigh Eric Schmidt sets Rufus Jones in his wider
American religious context (Schmidt, L. E., Restless Souls: the making of American spirituality,
San Francisco, CA: Harper, 2005, pp. 230–38), as does Gary Dorrien (Dorrien, G., The
Making of American Liberal Theology: idealism, realism, & modernity, 1900–1950, Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 2003, pp. 364–71 et passim). Given both Rufus Jones’ massive
influence on Quakerism and the perennially controversial nature of mysticism, the literature

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52 Quaker Studies

comparison of their writings reveals a high correspondence of understanding of

the dynamics of the inward life: a sense of awe, inspired by beauty, that leads to a
sacramental view of life in which God is available to all. This results in a democra-
tisation of the mystical life, which in turn inspires a pluralistic appreciation of
God’s mystical presence in persons of other religious communities, even as one
stands firmly in one’s own and acknowledges its particular, distinctive truth. For
each writer, this process opened a path to respond to the challenges of modernity
in the early twentieth century.

Rufus Jones and Said Nursi

The lifespan of Rufus Jones, 1863–1948, overlaps significantly with that of Said
Nursi, 1877–1960. Both were prominent religious leaders in their day and each
left a sizeable collection of writings. Each of them responded to pressing issues
of modernity that the early twentieth century posed, and each drew upon the
mystical tradition of his religious community as a resource for that response.
Rufus Jones was fundamentally a religious philosopher, an exponent of divine
immanence and a believer in the human potential to transform society. His rural
youth in a village in Maine gave him a practicality and a capacity to communicate
with people of all educational backgrounds. He never lost these traits, even
though his adult life was spent as a professor of philosophy at Haverford College
in Pennsylvania. He shared the liberal, progressive, optimistic spirit of his age,
but was no mere rationalist. As a contemporary of Evelyn Underhill, Friedrich
von Hügel and William Ralph Inge, he lived in an era of revived attention to
mysticism. Like them, Rufus Jones rejected the materialist assumptions of the
prevailing social science at that time. For him, the human personality is more
than simply the result of external forces. Religion begins with inward, personal
experience. Rufus Jones was acquainted with mysticism both experientially
and as a scholar, and he wrote extensively and vividly on the spiritual life. He
especially loved the fourteenth-century mystics Meister Eckhart and Johannes
Tauler, though the mysticism that he promoted for his own day differed. The
mysticism of Rufus Jones valued the external world and inward experience as
loci where divinity revealed itself. Union with God drove the mystic back into

on Rufus Jones is at times contentious, and he has been alternately praised or blamed for
what a particular writer sees as right or wrong with liberal Quakerism ever since. See, for
example, Aiken, G., ‘Who took the Christ out of Quakerism? Rufus Jones and the person
and work of Christ’, Quaker Religious Thought 116 (2011), pp. 37–53, and Rock, H., ‘Rufus
Jones Never Did Establish that Quakerism Is a Mystical Religion’, Quaker Studies 21 (2004),
pp. 49–66. The most recent monograph (Holt, H., Mysticism and the Inner Light in the Thought
of Rufus Jones, Quaker, Leiden: Brill, 2021) makes excellent use of private correspondence,
examines, among other things, the influence upon Rufus Jones of William James, Josiah
Royce and others, and focuses on psychology and Rufus Jones’ theology of human–divine
relationship (or, as she argues, commonality) in his conception of the Inner Light.
Birkel Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life 53

the world for service. No longer reserved for the few, the mystical life was within
the reach of all, who could trust their intuition of the nearness of the God who
dwelt within them. Jones himself was a person of service, a founder and long-time
chairperson of the American Friends Service Committee, whose relief efforts in
Europe during and after the two major wars of the twentieth century earned the
agency and its British Quaker counterpart the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947.3 Rufus
Jones was an active ecumenist.4 Through his gifts as a widely travelled orator and
a writer of over fifty books, he exerted a greater influence on other Protestants
than any previous Quaker.
Like Rufus Jones, Said Nursi lived his early years outside urban centres of
culture.5 His home was in the eastern provinces and the ethnically Kurdish
region of what is today the modern nation of Turkey but that in the first portion
of his life was the Ottoman Empire. Also like Rufus Jones, he saw himself as an
educator, through the founding of schools and through his abundant writings.
And again like Rufus Jones, Said Nursi was profoundly influenced by the mystical
traditions of his religious community, such as such as ‘Abd al-Qadir Jilani, Shaykh
Ahmad Sirhindi, ibn al-‘Arabi and Abu Hamid Muhammad Ghazali,6 yet found
them insufficient and unsuited for the modern world, preferring a more open,
democratised understanding of the inward life. The natural world proclaimed the
mysteries of divinity. The mystic must engage the social world, particularly efforts
for justice—a longstanding Islamic ideal. During and after the First World War,
Said Nursi engaged in service and reform work and laboured for renewal, although,
unlike Rufus Jones, he largely withdrew from the political sphere particularly
because he was regularly subjected to internal exile in eastern Anatolia. While
Rufus Jones flourished in the midst of modern liberal Protestantism, Said Nursi
dwelt in a context of fierce conflict between religious conservatives and nationalist
secularists, though he preached a third way to both, promoting dialogue and
pluralism. Finally, like Rufus Jones, Said Nursi’s influence was broad and deep.
It has been estimated that the Nur community, as his followers call themselves,
numbers several million.

3 The AFSC was active both domestically and internationally during these years (https://
www.afsc.org/content/history-afsc, accessed 04/12/2021) but the motivation for the Nobel
Prize was ‘for their pioneering work in the international peace movement and compassionate
effort to relieve human suffering, thereby promoting the fraternity between nations’ (https://
www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1947/friends-committee/facts/, accessed 04/12/2021).
4 See Angell, S. W., ‘Rufus Jones and the Laymen’s Foreign Mission Enquiry: how
a Quaker helped to shape modern ecumenical Christianity’, Quaker Theology 3 (2000),
pp. 167–209.
5 Markham, I. S., and Pirim, S. B., An Introduction to Said Nursi: life, thought and writings,
Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, particularly pp. 3–19, 40–49, 60–61.
6 Turner, C., The Qur’an Revealed: a critical analysis of Said Nursi’s Epistles of Light, Berlin:
Gerlach Press, 2013, pp. 75–76, 88–89, 507.
54 Quaker Studies

Awe

How does one listen to the words of another tradition? What might one hear?
Perhaps the first thing noticed by the newcomer and non-Muslim is the profound
sense of awe in the writings of Said Nursi. This deep feeling of reverence in the
presence of the divine mystery pervades much of his work. It invites the reader into
a comparable experience of wonderment and brings to mind the words of the great
Jewish philosopher and mystic of the last century, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel
described awe as ‘a way of being in rapport with the mystery of all reality’.7 It ‘is
the sense of wonder and humility inspired by the sublime or felt in the presence
of mystery … . Awe, unlike fear, does not make us shrink from the awe-inspiring
object, but, on the contrary, draws us near to it. This is why awe is compatible with
both love and joy’.8 Heschel notes that awe is ‘an insight better conveyed in attitudes
than in words. The more eager we are to express it, the less remains of it’.9
Why do pious Muslims read Said Nursi? For disciples of Nursi, reading his
works is an encounter with the presence of the holy. Non-Muslims guests can
also feel the invitation to spiritual presence that his writings extend. That is what
one encounters in such passages that describe the cosmos as a vast, orderly edifice
that is a reflection of the divine names.10 Nursi describes a world in which an
outsider can be a guest.
The humble bee can inspire the type of awe described by Abraham Joshua
Heschel:
All living beings, for instance this adorned flower or that sweet-producing bee, are
Divine odes full of meaning which innumerable conscious beings study in delight.
They are precious miracles of power and proclamations of wisdom exhibiting their
Maker’s art in captivating fashion to innumerable appreciative observers. While
to appear before the gaze of the Glorious Creator, Who wishes to observe His art
Himself, and look on the beauties of His creation and the loveliness of the manifes-
tations of His Names, is another exceedingly elevated result of their creation.11

7 Heschel, A. J., God in Search of Man: a philosophy of Judaism, New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1955, p. 74.
8 Heschel, God in Search, p. 77.
9 Heschel, God in Search, p. 75.
10 Turner, The Qur’an Revealed, p. 34. In this essay I will make use chiefly of Colin
Turner’s work as a resource for Said Nursi’s thought because it is the largest volume in
English on Nursi and because it contains a vast number of lengthy quotations from Nursi’s
writings. Other important volumes on Nursi published in English include Vahide, Ş., and
Abu-Rabiʻ, I. M., Islam in Modern Turkey: an intellectual biography of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005; Markham and Pirim, Introduction to Said
Nursi; Michel, T., Insights from the Risale-i Nur: Said Nursi’s advice for modern believers, Clifton,
NJ: Tughra Books, 2013; Markham, I. S., and Sayilgan, Z., (eds), The Companion to Said
Nursi Studies, Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017.
11 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 56.
Birkel Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life 55

If the lowly bee can yield a sense of wonder to the attentive observer, the world
as a whole can be nearly overwhelming, as Said Nursi wrote:
The All-Powerful and Wise One Who created this cosmos created also life as a
comprehensive summary of the cosmos, and concentrated all of His purposes and
the manifestations of His Names therein. So too, within the realm of life He made
of provision a comprehensive centre of activity and created within animate beings
the taste for provision, thus causing animate beings to respond to His dominicality
and love with a permanent and universal gratitude, thankfulness and worship that
is one of the significant purposes and instances of wisdom inherent in the creation
of the universe. Were there to be an eye capable of witnessing and comprehending
the whole surface of the earth at one time, in order to perceive the beauties of the
Names of Compassionate and Provider and the witness they bear to Divine unity,
it would see what sweet beauty is contained in the tender and solicitous manifes-
tation of the Compassionate Provider Who sends to the caravans of animals at the
end of winter, when their provision is about to be exhausted, extremely delicious,
abundant and varied foods and bounties, drawn exclusively from His unseen
treasury of mercy, as succour from the unseen and Divine generosity, placed in the
hands of plants, the crowns of trees, and the breasts of mothers.12
This deep sense of awe can shape a reading of Said Nursi. Even someone not
within the historical Muslim community can feel the invitation into divine
presence. Reading becomes not simply a means of acquiring information or
engaging critically with ideas. Such reading situates one on holy ground.
Similarly, awe was a pervasive presence and a gateway to the spiritual life for
Rufus Jones. In his autobiographical Finding the Trail of Life, for example, he notes
the role of awe and describes it as a ‘religious feeling’ that he found in natural
phenomena such as woods, stars and lightning, as well as in the hushed silence
that followed daily Bible reading in his childhood home.13
What follows are some categories that can facilitate the consideration of
commonalities between Said Nursi and Rufus Jones.

Beauty

Beauty can inspire awe. Both Said Nursi and Rufus Jones were touched by beauty.
Colin Turner writes of Nursi:
Now according to a Prophetic Tradition,14 God is beautiful and He loves beauty.
Beauty, like the rest of the names, requires ‘mirrors’ if it is to be observed, and
the existence of Divine love means that it must be observed: that Beauty is loved

12 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 48.

13 Jones, R. M., Following the Trail of Life, New York: Macmillan, 1947, pp. 77, 58, 54
and 34, respectively, as well as pp. 49–58 generally.
14 A Prophetic Tradition or hadith is a narrative attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.
Collectively, such traditions constitute, after the Qur’an itself, a major source of religious
authority in Islam.
56 Quaker Studies

implies that it is also seen, and that beauty is seen implies that there are ‘mirrors’
in which it is seen. And the existence of those mirrors is motivated by the force
of love which not only appreciates in an absolute sense that beauty but also wills,
by dint of that love, that beauty be made manifest. Again … God requires the
existence of mirrors in which to observe His beauty, and the observation of His
beauty is motivated by love. Moreover, Nursi maintains, all of the activity we
observe in the phenomenal world—the constant flux and flow of existents and
events—is underpinned by a ceaseless Divine activity that is fuelled—for want of
a better term—by Divine love.15
For his part, Rufus Jones writes that ‘the Nature that presents the occasions for
Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love … is a Nature deeply interfused with Spirit—
Coherence, Order, Significance, and Meaning’,16 that ‘to the mystic he [God]
becomes real in the same sense that experienced beauty is real’.17 Succinctly put,
‘we find Him [God] when we enjoy beauty’.18

Divine Availability

Beauty and awe are evidence of God for both Said Nursi and Rufus Jones. For
some, these are the first paths toward God to be experienced, although there are
other conduits to divine availability. Both Nursi and Jones wrote passionately
about God’s accessibility in this world of creation. Because in Christian teaching
the human person is created in the image of God, Rufus Jones finds the primary
path to God to be an inward one:
There is some inner meeting place between the soul and God; in other words,
that the divine and human, God and man, are not wholly sundered. In an earlier
time God was conceived as remote and transcendent. He dwelt in the citadel of the
sky, was worshiped with ascending incense and communicated His will to beings
beneath through celestial messengers or by mysterious oracles. We have now more
ground than ever before for conceiving God as transcendent; that is, as above and
beyond any revelation of Himself, and as more than any finite experience can
apprehend. But at the same time, our experience and our ever-growing knowledge
of the outer and inner universe confirm our faith that God is also immanent, a real
presence, a spiritual reality, immediately to be felt and known, a vital, life-giving
environment of the soul.19
The early twentieth century was an age of remarkable scientific progress, whether
in the laboratory or in the realm of the human psyche. For Rufus Jones, such
discoveries could be occasions of wonder, pointing beyond themselves to the

15 Turner, The Qur’an Revealed, p. 435.

16 Jones, R. M., Spirit in Man, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1941, p. 57.
17 Jones, R. M., Spiritual Energies, New York: Macmillan, 1922, p. 144.
18 Jones, R. M., Religious Foundations, New York: Macmillan, 1923, p. 41.
19 Jones, R. M., The Inner Life, New York: Macmillan, 1916, pp. 97–98.
Birkel Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life 57

presence of a benevolent divinity. Both what we know and what we cannot know
urge us beyond.
There are deeps in our consciousness which no private plumb line of our own can
sound; there are heights in our moral conscience which no ladder of our human
intelligence can scale; there are spiritual hungers, longings, yearnings, passions,
which find no explanation in terms of our physical inheritance or of our outside
world. We touch upon the coasts of a deeper universe, not yet explored or mapped,
but no less real and certain than this one in which our mortal senses are at home.
We cannot explain our normal selves or account for the best things we know—or
even for our condemnation of our poorer, lower self—without an appeal to and
acknowledgment of a divine Guest and companion who is the real presence of
our central being.20
Steeped in the Islamic mystical tradition of ibn al-‘Arabi, Said Nursi understood
the world as a manifestation of Divine presence. God’s essence is unknowable, but
the names or attributes of God are revealed in the created world. To that degree,
the divine can be known.21 As Colin Turner notes, the key to belief for Nursi lies
in deciphering the signs in the created book of the cosmos, in reading the book
of creation ‘in the name of God’.22
Borrowing from a term from Christian theological tradition, Colin Turner uses
the word ‘sacramental’ to describe Said Nursi’s understanding of that which is not
God. Christian tradition understands a sacrament as a ritual that is an outward
sign of an inward reality and a means of divine grace. In some ways, it may be
comparable to the Islamic understanding of ayat, signs of divine presence.
Nursi’s exposition of Divine Unity is based on his uncompromisingly theocentric
depiction of the phenomenal world as a divinely-penned ‘book’ … revealed as
nothing less than manifestations or individuations of the Divine attributes of
perfection. Nursi’s view of all existence that is other-than-God is thus a wholly
sacramental one, in which the transcendent sacred and the Source of all existence,
i.e., the Divine, pervades all things.23
Rufus Jones likewise finds that pervasive presence of God. He does not hesitate
to call this reality sacramental. As a Quaker he refrained from participation in
external sacramental rituals, but he found meaning in the language of sacrament
as an external indication of an inward truth and a mediation of divine grace.
It is a sacramental universe through which Deep calleth unto Deep and significant
realities of the impalpable and intangible sort ‘break in’ on us and answer to our
deepest being. We reach through the veil of what we call matter and are in a higher
World which is kin to our minds and to which, as great amphibians, we really
belong. In fact we lie open-windowed to it and partake of it. This Over-World of

20 Jones, Inner Life, pp. 100–01.

21 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 18.
22 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 58.
23 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 52.
58 Quaker Studies

Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love is as truly and obviously beyond the welter and
storms of the processes of matter and the basic stuff of the universe as our minds
are above and beyond the swirl of the brain paths which somehow correlate with
minds and appear to be the occasion for thought.24
Elsewhere he wrote in a similar vein,
We have sound reason to believe that what is highest in us is deepest in the nature
of things. We become organs of a spiritual kingdom and stand in vital relation to
an Eternal Mind and Heart and Will with whom we cooperate.25
Human beings are capable both of recognising and responding to this
sacramental quality of reality. As Colin Turner points out, Said Nursi holds that
humankind has a receptivity to the impress of the divine names or attributes. Of
all creatures, humans alone are able to reflect all of the divine names, provided
that they can look beyond the external, phenomenal world to the inner realm that
is the source of those qualities.26
Rufus Jones espoused a comparably profound sense of connection. Drawing
on the early Christian writer Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215), he posited a
‘mutual and reciprocal correspondence’ between the human spirit and God:
The essential characteristic of [mysticism] is the attainment of a personal conviction
by an individual that the human spirit and the divine Spirit have met, have found
each other, and are in mutual and reciprocal correspondence as spirit with Spirit.27

Democratisation of the Mystical Life

Because the world is sacramental, all people are beckoned to the spiritual life.
Mysticism is available to all. Both Said Nursi and Rufus Jones could be said to
have democratised the mystical life, holding it as a possibility for people in all
walks of life. It was not the private realm of spiritual elites.

24 Jones, Spirit in Man, pp. 57–58.

25 Jones, R. M., The Testimony of the Soul, New York: Macmillan, 1936, p. 69.
26 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 91.
27 Jones, R. M., The Trail of Life in the Middle Years, New York: Macmillan, 1934,
pp. 192–92. The phrase from Clement is found in his Stromateis 2.4.16. Rufus Jones was so
attracted to Clement of Alexandria that he published a volume of translations of excerpts,
Selections from the Writings of Clement of Alexandria, London: Headley Brothers, 1914. There,
on pp. 55–56, he renders the relevant passage as: ‘Knowledge, accordingly, is characterised
by faith; and faith, by a kind of divine and mutual correspondence, becomes characterised by
knowledge’ (original emphasis). Rufus Jones used the same expression to describe silent
worship: ‘it may be an intensified pause, a vitalised hush, a creative quiet, an actual moment
of mutual and reciprocal correspondence with God’. Jones, R. M., ‘The Spiritual Message
of the Religious Society of Friends’, in Friends World Conference, Report of the Commission
I, 1937, p. 13. Quoted in Britain Yearly Meeting’s Quaker Faith & Practice, London, 2nd
edn, §2.16 (http://qfp.quaker.org.uk/chapter/2/, accessed 04/12/2021).
Birkel Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life 59

Colin Turner writes of how Said Nursi, while deeply influenced by the Sufi
tradition within Islam, nonetheless was cautious of it. It can be exclusive and
elitist, and it can be self-deceptive and therefore spiritually dangerous. Nursi
wrote that his ‘path is much broader and more universal’.28 As Colin Turner puts
it, ‘not only is his path safer and surer, Nursi claims, but it is also more inclusive
and accessible’.29
Rufus Jones distinguished between what he called negative mystics and
affirmation mystics. The former, he claimed, emphasised retreat from the
physical world that is perceived by sense and studied by reason. They laboured to
encounter God by dint of ascetical feat. They strove for the fleeting moment of
ecstasy, which they experienced as a loss of personal individuality in an infinite
sea of divinity.30 Affirmation mystics, for their part, valued the external world as
a location of divine disclosure. Union with God integrated the self and impelled
the mystic back into the world to serve society. Rufus Jones held that many more
people had had mystical experiences than was commonly supposed. A nascent
mystical consciousness, though perhaps not fully developed, was present is most
religious persons, but since, throughout history, most of them did not possess
the literary gifts to record their experiences, they have not been recognised.
Mystical experiences come in mild as well as intense degrees, he held. Rufus
Jones described mystical experience as a direct and immediate awareness of divine
presence, the encounter of human spirit and divine spirit.31 With the assistance of
these two concepts of affirmation mysticism and of a range of mystical experience,
Rufus Jones redefined the mystical life, opening the depths of the spiritual life to
a multitude of readers.32

Corollaries of the Democratisation of the Mystical Life

There are corollaries to this democratisation of the mystical life. The first is
a practical orientation to the spiritual life. Colin Turner puts it crisply when
he writes, ‘One always gets the impression that Nursi’s theology was, on the
whole, intended to be more practical than speculative.’33 Said Nursi was above all

28 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 353.

29 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 354.
30 Rufus Jones had his own extraordinary experiences, even if he did not regard them
as essential to the mystical life. He reflects on these in Jones, R. M., ‘Why I Enroll with
the Mystics’, in Ferm, V. (ed.), Contemporary American Theology: theological autobiographies, New
York: Round Table Press, 1932, pp. 206–09 and 213–14.
31 Jones, Inner Life, pp. 178–81. See also his Social Law in the Spiritual World, London:
Headley Brothers, 1904, pp. 131–38.
32 For an account of the impact of Rufus Jones on the general reader see Hedstrom,
M. S., ‘Rufus Jones and Mysticism for the Masses’, CrossCurrents 54 (2004), pp. 31–44.
33 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 85.
60 Quaker Studies

responding to the profound needs of his day, and his writings intended to address
those needs, just as his efforts in education did.
Rufus Jones shared this practical orientation. He wrote:
In putting the emphasis for the moment on the inner way of religion, we must
be very careful not to encourage the heresy of treating religion as a withdrawal
from the world, or as a retreat from the press and strain of the practical issues and
problems of the social order.34
The affirmation mystics, as he called them,
do not make vision the end of life, but rather the beginning. They are bent on
having an immediate first-hand sense of God—but not just for the joy of having
it. More important than vision is obedience to the vision. There are battles to fight
and victories to win. God’s Kingdom is to be advanced.35
Said Nursi expressed a similar reservation about ecstasy for its own sake. As
Colin Turner puts it, ‘he offers what he believes is the “sober”—and thus safer—
path to apprehending the reality behind the existence of the cosmos’.36
A second corollary of this democratisation for each of these thinkers is an
emphasis on community. The religious community, or ‘brotherhood’ as Said
Nursi puts it, is where, for example, the spiritual life is experienced, where one
can learn virtues such as sincerity and selflessness. Nursi urged that ‘one should
try to forget the feelings of one’s own carnal soul and instead live in one’s mind
with one’s brothers’ virtues and feelings’.
For Rufus Jones, his experience as a Quaker laid great importance on
community. Friends hold that all who gather to worship have equal access to God,
and so anyone present may feel called upon to speak words of edification to those
assembled. Just as the individual served the community through sharing inspired
words, the community in turn could enable the individual to become more fully
aware of the presence of God.37 Rufus Jones further wrote that when gathered in
a powerful sense of divine presence the community itself can attain a ‘high level
of social communion’ in which ‘the most delicate sense of truth’ can be attained.38
In other words, discernment of truth is a community undertaking.
The third corollary of this democratisation of the mystical life concerns the
boundaries of religious communities and the transcendence of those boundaries
by shared concern and conviction.
As Colin Turner points out, Said Nursi’s thought lends itself to a wide
understanding of the Islamic concept of submission:

34 Jones, Inner Life, p. 14.

35 Jones, Social Law in the Spiritual World, p. 135. One of the earliest books of Rufus
Jones was entitled Practical Christianity (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1899), the very title
of which indicates his concrete orientation to the mystical life.
36 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 4.
37 Jones, Inner Life, pp. 103–04.
38 Jones, Social Law, p. 173.
Birkel Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life 61

As Nursi’s use of the terms involved shows, there are two modalities of submission:
the formal, which for ease of understanding we can call ‘upper case-I Islam’, that
is, Islam the religion; and the internal, or ‘lower case-i islām’, which signifies the
submission of the heart and spirit in response to the information accepted by the
intellect. The distinction between Islam and islām confirms the possibility firstly
that some Muslims are not actually muslim in the Quranic sense of the word; and,
secondly, that some non-Muslims may also be considered muslim.39
Similarly, for Rufus Jones, spiritual experience can rise above denomina-
tional identity and foster a broader unity among human beings.40 He spoke
positively of the sixteenth-century spiritual reformers Sebastian Franck and
Caspar Schwenckfeld, whose notion of the Church was at once both inward and
transcendent of ecclesial boundaries. Similarly, in the following century, Jakob
Boehme, whom Rufus Jones deeply admired, differentiated the stone church from
the broader, invisible and, in his view, more genuine Church.41
Rufus Jones’ writing were widely read in his day among mainstream Protestants
in North America. He intentionally wrote for a broad Christian audience, yet he
spoke from his deep experience as a Friend. Consequently, many of his readers
became attracted to some elements of Quakerism, although they did not want
to abandon their existing religious affiliation. In 1936 Rufus Jones initiated the
Wider Quaker Fellowship, which grew to become an association of people of
diverse religious backgrounds who felt nourished by the gifts of the Religious
Society of Friends and yet did not wish formally to seek membership there. This
Fellowship is one instance of how Rufus Jones’ ideas of the universal availability
of the mystical life widened religious horizons.

Nonviolence

Related to the concept of reconsidering the role of religious boundaries is a

commitment to nonviolence. A universalisation of spiritual experience and truth
can imply that commonalities triumph over differences. One can become resistant
to the notion of enmity and therefore to the need for or justification of violence.
Quakers of course are widely recognised as having a longstanding commitment
to nonviolence—what they call the peace testimony. Rufus Jones subscribed to
this Quaker teaching, and he was eager to correct the all-too-frequent misunder-
standing of pacifism as somehow related to being passive.

39 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 286.

40 For his views on religious ‘unity’ rather than ‘uniformity’ see Jones, R. M., A Preface
to Christian Faith in a New Age, New York: Macmillan, 1932, pp. 143–50.
41 For Franck and Schwenckfeld see Jones, R. M., Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries, New York: Macmillan, 1914, pp. 46–87. For Boehme see Birkel, M.,
and Bach, J., Genius for the Transcendent: mystical writings of Jakob Boehme, Boston: Shambhala,
2010, pp. 60–61, 84–91.
62 Quaker Studies

Pacifism means peace-making. The pacifist is literally a peace-maker. He is not a

passive or negative person who proposes to lie back and do nothing in the face
of injustice, unrighteousness and rampant evil. He stands for ‘the fiery positive’.42
On a practical level, one demonstration of Rufus Jones’ commitment to
nonviolence was his work as a founder and long-time chair of the board of the
American Friends Service Committee, a relief organisation that was committed
to feeding and caring for the victims of war on both sides of the conflict. This
might be seen as a social manifestation of the concept of widening boundaries
that was discussed earlier.
While scholars of Said Nursi are quick to point out that he was not a
full-fledged pacifist and that he was a combatant during the First World War, they
also recognise his redefinition of the notion of jihad. Jihad, of course, had always
meant much more than simply conducting warfare, although Muslims throughout
much of their history had understood it as applying to the violent exertion of
force. For his part, Said Nursi disentangles the notion of an Islamic civilisation
from an Islamic state. The goal is an Islamic state of mind.
To be truly human is to live in the manner prescribed by the Quran, namely to
aspire to reflect the attributes of God and become His vicegerent, His khalifa. This
means that he must endeavor to establish for himself not an Islamic state, but an
Islamic state of mind.43
As Colin Turner notes, Said Nursi’s comments on jihad are few but ‘unambiguous
and incisive: the only kind of jihād that is appropriate for the present age, he says,
is “spiritual” (ma‘nawī) or moral jihād’.44 For Said Nursi, ‘the time for militant
jihād against external human enemies is over, for the simple reason that the
threats posed by such enemies are no longer physical but, rather, ideological
and intellectual’.45 In the words of Nursi himself, ‘For conquering the civilised
is through persuasion, not through force as though they were savages who
understand nothing. We are devotees of love; we do not have time for enmity.’46
The jihad that is fitting to this age is the ‘jihad of the pen’.47

42 Jones, R. M., The New Quest, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928, p. 97.
43 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 535.
44 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 563. See also p. 561, where jihad is described as ‘a purely
moral and spiritual endeavour’. Here one might recall that the horrors of the First World
War, which Rufus Jones and Said Nursi experienced although differently, brought many
people to at least a temporary embrace of non-violence. This turn appears to be permanent
for Said Nursi. For Rufus Jones, of course, it was an essential teaching of the Religious
Society of Friends all along.
45 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 563.
46 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 563.
47 Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 569. Interestingly, this concept of the jihad of the pen was
espoused by other Muslims in the early twentieth century, such as Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.
I learned of this from Fazeel S. Khan. See Birkel, M., Qur’an in Conversation, Waco, TX:
Baylor University Press, 2014, pp. 160–61.
Birkel Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life 63

In sum, although there are of course considerable differences between these two
thinkers, reading them in juxtaposition points to commonalities. These include
an appreciation of beauty, a sense of divine availability, a sacramental quality to
the world that points to the reality and the nearness of its creator, a profound
experience of connectedness with God that is accessible to all and a democrati-
sation of the inward life. This spiritual egalitarianism in turn leads to a practical
orientation to serve the world, to a deep valuing of the religious community and
to a transcending of the boundaries of religious identities that in turn expresses
itself in a commitment to non-violence. Such a progression of thought may appear
straightforward in retrospect to some, but in fact both Rufus Jones and Said Nursi
drew these conclusions while many in their respective communities did not. This
shared outlook is all the more remarkable for the fact that it was shared across an
otherwise formidable theological difference. The fact that they held these views
in common points to suggestive possibilities for interfaith understanding, even
though neither of them pursued specifically Muslim–Christian dialogue in their
day.
What happens when we allow interfaith dialogue to begin with the mystics?
Each of these two thinkers was profoundly shaped by his community’s mystical
tradition, and each believed that this mystical tradition could serve as a resource
for responding to the challenges of modernity. That mystical orientation informed
the openness of each writer toward inter-religious understanding, even as each
stood solidly within his own tradition. It can be argued that this solid identity
as Muslim or Quaker enabled each to travel to the boundary of that tradition to
engage with persons from other traditions. At the same time, those established
identities resulted in profound differences. If asked, for example, Said Nursi would
certainly have disagreed with Rufus Jones’ insistence that group worship without
ritual and without liturgically ordered speech is the best. Likewise Rufus Jones
would have been puzzled by Said Nursi’s deeply held concept of divine determi-
nation and its consequences upon one’s understanding of the human person.48
Yet, because each would speak of what many (though not all) would recognise as
the heart of his community’s wisdom and the individual’s innermost experience,
it seems more than possible that they would have recognised each other as kin,

48 Quakers had rejected the doctrine of predestination since the seventeenth century.
Robert Barclay, for example, famously referred to it as a ‘horrible and blasphemous doctrine’.
Barclay, R., Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Glenside, PA: Quaker heritage Press, 2002,
p. 98. For his part, when Nursi writes of the person ‘who believes in Divine Determining
and grasps the wisdom behind it. Free from the monomaniacal desire to control things
which are far from his grasp, and refusing to carry the burden of a whole world on his
shoulders, he places his trust in the Sovereign and is able to live at peace with himself
and his world’ (Turner, Qur’an Revealed, p. 397), one can recall Calvin’s declaration that
the doctrine of predestination is one of assurance and comfort. See J. Calvin, F. L. Battles
(trans.) and McNeill, J. T., (ed.), Institutes of the Christian Religion, Philadelphia: Westminster,
1960, pp. 920–87.
64 Quaker Studies

and perhaps experienced in that encounter the spiritual awe described earlier in
this essay.
This discovery of significant common ground in the thought of Rufus Jones
and Said Nursi raises the question of the value of such a comparison for Quaker
studies. I undertook this exploration as someone who is a student of Quaker
studies as well as someone who has for many years been active as a participant in
interfaith dialogue, especially between Muslims and Christians, through in-person
settings such as conferences as well as in writing.49 Beyond an exploration of two
historical figures, this finding of a correspondence of ideas invites theological
reflection. The limits of a journal article do not permit lengthy expatiation on the
matter, so I close with some queries, as befits the Quaker tradition. What might
be the role of awe in interfaith understanding? What does a shared experience of
transcendence, across religious boundaries, suggest about the nature of religious
community? The noted Buddhist Jack Kornfield entitled one of his books
After Ecstasy, the Laundry50—if one experiences an exhilarating sense of mutual
recognition in an interfaith encounter, akin to what Quaker Douglas Steere called
‘mutual irradiation’,51 what tasks lie ahead after the power of that moment fades?

Author Details

Michael Birkel is Professor of Christian Spirituality at the Earlham School of

Religion, Richmond, Indiana, USA. His works include Silence and Witness; ‘A
Near Sympathy’; Engaging Scripture; Qur’an in Conversation; Quakers Reading Mystics;
and (with Charlotte Northrop) Quakeriana Latina: Quaker Texts in Latin from the
1670s.
Mailing address: Earlham School of Religion, 228 College Avenue, Richmond,
IN, 47374, USA.
Email: [email protected]

49 See, for example, Birkel, Qur’an in Conversation; Birkel, M., ‘Reading the Qur’an as
a Quaker’, Friends Journal (August 2019), pp. 22–23; Birkel, M., ‘A Pedagogy of Listening:
teaching the Qur’an to non-Muslims’, in Patel, E., Peace, J. H., and Silverman, J. N., (eds),
Interreligious-Interfaith Studies: defining a new field, Boston: Beacon Press, 2018, pp. 98–106.
50 Kornfield, J., After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, New York: Bantam Books, 2000.
51 Steere, D. V., Mutual Irradiation; a Quaker view of ecumenism, Wallingford, PA: Pendle
Hill Publications, 1971.