As for the Medresetü'z-Zehra, Bediuzzaman intended for it to play the central and unifying role in Asia that al-Azhar performs in Africa. Besides combating racialism and nationalism by acting as a centre of learning and attracting students from "Arabia, India, Iran, Caucasia, Turkestan, and Kurdistan" and thus contributing to the development of a sense of "Islamic nationhood", this large Islamic university would also "reconcile the sciences of philosophy and those of religion, and make peace between European civilization and the truths of Islam." In thus unifying secular and religious education, it would be both a modern secular school and a religious school. As has been described in previous chapters, Bediuzzaman received money at various times for its construction, but due to the vicissitudes of the times, the project could not be realized.

Doubtless the main reason Bediuzzaman mentioned the Medresetü'z-Zehra was that the new president, Celâl Bayar, had announced in a speech in Van in 1951 that the Democrat government planned to build a university there in eastern Turkey. Bediuzzaman had met the announcement with gratification, equating it with his Medresetü'z-Zehra, and writing to inform his students of it under the heading "Some Important Good News for Risale-i Nur Students". [^80] Again in the present letter, he applauded the president's move, both for Turkey as a whole, and the east of the country, and as "a foundation stone of general peace in the Middle East," Only he stressed that for it to perform this vital function, the sciences of religion should be taken as the basis of the university, for "the destruction" was caused by external forces and was not of a physical nature, but was "moral and spiritual" (mânevî). What would counter and reverse the destruction also had to be of a moral and spiritual nature, "as powerful as an atom bomb". As a specialist on these matters of some fifty-five years' standing, Bediuzzaman had the right to speak concerning them.

[^80]:Ibid., 35.

It may be added that although the government completed the project and the Eastern University was opened in November 1958, it was built in Erzurum, not Van, and given the name, Ataturk University. The campaign the RPP and some newspapers conducted against the government protesting that it was "building Said Nursi's medrese" may have had some bearing on this.

In connection with the Baghdad Pact, it might also be mentioned that Bediuzzaman's students who were with him at the time of the revolution in Iraq, 14 July 1958, have recorded his extreme distress at the events there. This was not only at the brutal killings, many of the victims of which were