Preface

 بِسْمِ اللّٰهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ 

Preface

When the treatises of the Risale-i Nur first began to be written in 1926 in the village of Barla in Isparta Province in south-western Turkey, the students of its author, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, who lived in the region wrote to him expressing their feelings of respect and gratitude and explaining how they had benefited and profited from his writings, and they sought answers to their questions and problems. The letters contained in the volumes entitled Barla Lahikası, Kastamonu Lahikası, and Emirdağ Lahikası and named after the three main places of Bediuzzaman's exile, thus consist of the letters written by Bediuzzaman to his students and the letters written by the students to Bediuzzaman. These three volumes of additional letters form the Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Risale-i Nur Collection.

Barla Lahikası — Barla Letters [^1]

[^1]:The letters included in Barla Letters were first of all written out by hand in the Qur'anic script and put together in notebooks, then in part examined and corrected by Bediuzzaman. He marked the letters with two, three, four, or more signs, indicating their importance. There was one small copy of Barla Letters which was duplicated in Istanbul in 1956 with Bediuzzaman's approval, and had included at the front of it, "The Seven Divine Favours" from Letters 1928-1932,∗ and contained also letters from the above-mentioned notebooks and several from the Emirdağ Letters. The Barla Letters which has now been printed and published, has been put together from the handwritten copies which were corrected by Bediuzzaman and those which were duplicated. Most of the letters in the handwritten copies have been put in the same order; the ordering is virtually the same in all of them. Letters that have not been included in those copies are the private letters Bediuzzaman wrote to some of the leading Nur students such as Hulûsi Ağabey and Re'fet Ağabey, which due to their importance and the learned truths they contain, have been included in the printed edition. In a letter in the first volume of Emirdağ Letters, he expresses his wish that those letters should be printed: "Brother Re'fet! You are indeed most welcome! I am overjoyed at your busying yourself with writing out the Risale-i Nur. Your questions have produced meaningful results and sweet fruits in the Risale-i Nur, as have those of Hulûsi and Sabri. You may write out copies of the scholarly pieces you have that are not yet included in the Risale-i Nur, and add them either in the appropriate place, or to The Additional Letters." [Author] ∗ "The Seven Divine Favours" (Inayât-ı Seb'a), is the Seventh Part of the Twenty-Eighth Letter, see, Letters 1928-1932 (Istanbul: Sözler Publications, 2010), 424-33.

This consists of letters written by Bediuzzaman to his first students in Barla and letters written by them to him describing how they were benefit-