The Short Words

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 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.

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s treatise The Short Words is 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.