"After listening to this, Mustafa Pasha turned to Mevlânzâde and said:

"'You are wrong, Rifat Bey, and Bediuzzaman is right. It is not Kurdistan that should be formed, but the Ottoman Empire that should be reformed and revived.'" [^349]

[^349]:Şahiner, Said Nursi, 214-6, quoted from Mustafa Polat, Mülakat, 31-4.

Indeed, Bediuzzaman continued to support any attempts to strengthen unity between the Kurds and the rest of "the nation". As before, this was particularly in the fundamental area of education. In 1919 a society was founded to this end of which he was one of the fifteen founder members. Called The Society for the Propagation of Education among Kurds (Kürd Neşr-i Ma'arif Cemiyeti), it was non-political, independent, and concerned solely with education. It aimed initially to set up one primary school for Kurdish children in Istanbul, who, "of all the sons of the fatherland, were the ones most deprived of the bounty of education", and later as funds permitted to found others in areas where Kurds formed the majority of the inhabitants. [^350] He was also going to be successful in securing further funds from the Ankara Government for the Medresetü'z-Zehra, his university-level medrese in the East, as we shall see.

[^350]:T.Z. Tunaya, Türkiye'de Siyasal Partiler, ii, 188, 214-5.

#### Bediuzzaman Combats the British

Bediuzzaman Combats the British

During this time, the Şeyhü'l-İslam's Office was presented with a questionnaire on the religion of Islam by the Church of England authorities, and as a member of the Darü'l-Hikmet, Bediuzzaman was asked to prepare the answers. Outraged at this insolence on the part of the British, he wrote a few succinct words which bore the meaning of insults rather than answers. His intention was to protect the honour of Islam. He later described the affair as follows:

One time, when the British had destroyed the guns on the Bosphorus and had invaded Istanbul, the chief cleric of the Anglican Church, which is that country's highest religious authority, asked the Şeyhü'l-İslam's Office six questions about religion. I was a member of the Darü'l-Hikmeti'l-İslamiye at the time and they said to me: "You answer them!" They wanted a six-hundred-word reply to the six questions. I said: "I shall answer not with six hundred words, nor with six words, and not even with one word, but with a mouthful of spit! Because, you can see, the moment they stepped ashore here, their chief cleric arrogantly started asking us questions." [^351] And in Rumûz, Signs, a work he published at the time, Bediuzza-

[^351]:Nursi, Mektûbat, 390 (Eng. tr.: Letters, 488).